Edward Reilly (MA, PhD) is a poet whose recent work has appeared in Three Poets (Geelong, 2019), Tokyo Poetry Journal, EgoPhobia (Romania), Cordite, and Quadrant (Melbourne). His poetry reflects a sustained engagement with international literary cultures and contemporary poetic practice. He is the author of the travelogue First Snow (2004), which explores place, memory, and cultural encounter. From 2010 to 2019, he edited and directed the literary journal Azuria, shaping it into a respected platform for emerging and established writers. His work demonstrates a long-standing commitment to both creative writing and literary publishing.

Letter to Enoch Burke

 

Colleague, I have been reading all about you

And the hard times endured, and by your mother,

Your sister also, both gallant in awful adversity.

I’ll tell you a tale first, so you understand me

And where I’m coming from, so far away

Here in the three oceans distant Antipodes.

It’s said that my great-great-grandfather, a lad

Running foul of a magistrate who packed him

Off and away for seven long years for stealing a pig

Belonging to a Nugent of Cavan or thereabouts,

No doubt part of the whole programme of Clearances.

First, they shaved him bald and tossed away his O,

Then clapped him in irons for six sea months,

Dumped at Webb’s Creek & told to cut timber.

If you haven’t done before, please read Heaney

With close attention: there’s a new edition out.

That marvellous poet wrote not just about praties

But the bloody realities of the cruel Occupation.

 

… A cobble thrown a hundred years ago

Keeps coming at me, the first stone

Aimed at a great-grandmother’s turncoat brow …

 

How long did we endure? Still, we do persist,

Myself here, ten thousand miles away, you over there.

Like you, I took to teaching schoolchildren,

Not so much out of vocation as sheer necessity,

My father being cheated out of his vast economics,

Then persecuted by the Laborites and their stooges.

There were two others to feed and mother ill.

Eventually, I became fairly good at blackboarding

Chemical and mathematical equations, explaining

Even the dilemmas of Pip and dear Sylvia Plath.

 

Cara Maria! Trying to explain to a gang of obdurates

That a basic knowledge of Grammar and Spelling

Was a need, not luxury, for our struggling cookery girls,

If only to be able to read the television programmes,

Let alone a marriage certificate if one were with child,

Or for a boy to sign his name on a call-up notice.

Garth Boomer had been in town. He gave speeches

At revolutionary conferences, here, there, smiling everywhere. 

A nice enough chap, but full of himself and claptrap

Much the same as that obscure American proclaiming

‘Any child can be taught Integral Calculus’, or similar.

Hope, rather than Reality become the fashion over here.

Of course, I went along with it, at least someways:

Drama class, Year 9s, reclining nymphettes on frayed carpets

In a backroom of a deconsecrated Protestant chapel,

Being inducted into the mysteries of deep breathing

Before rising to become the Mechanicals in Arden.

 

Shakespeare would have approved, I do hope, now even,

That as the grand panjandrum of the English Department,

I insisted for first four years they learnt Grammar,

Then Spelling, all with a Pocket Oxford on desks:

And even Etymologies and tenuous Connections

With other languages, such as French, Latina and Greek.

Basic stuff, like Times Tables or the Periodic Table.

All quite unfashionable now as they are unsympathetic,

Mere abstractions rather than Living Emotions,

Which are still all the fashion these present times.

In one lesson, I remember clearly, I wrote out

All the Personal Pronouns in decent, clear English.

Then I showed the German scheme of things

As most had done that for at least three years. 

One of the girls ventured up and wrote out her pronouns,

In Lithuanian, no less. Then Agapí wrote hers.

Also, I wrote the Latin tables I knew from Mass,

And as some children came from Italian families,

They’re nodding: maybe the English are civilised!

 

Vain hope, that is! As far as I have ever been concerned

A he is a he, and a she is a she, then there is an it,

Which appeared only as hitman, whacker, thugee,

Quite the word for a Saxon brute on our shores,

His curvy knife slicing a bearded monk’s throat

Before running off with a pearly string of Rosary

Or Chalice, off to be melted down for golden coins

That could grease his thick thumbs, to buy pigs.

It’s the grunt and stink that comes from the Bench

That irritates me. A judge who would throw you,

A teacher of high estate, a Burke no less, into prison

All for the sake of a spoilt brat’s whining curse.

 

You, Enoch, and I, are cut from the same cloth.

We know that the basis of all Truth is quite simple:

One plus One equals Two. No judge in court can twist

That into anything else but what it properly is.

But from what I read in various reports on the æther

There’s provision for something like One and A Half

As a Legal Solution, and that this is the Truth!     

Even a Grayling would admit this is a nonsense,

Though, if it’s convenient, the Ayatollah would enjoin

That we all grovel before this wonderful Revelation,

Just as that bearded nabi, Marx, had so many do.

 

All I can do is grump and grumble, offer a prayer

That you and family will endure this onerous scourge.

Those buzzing gadflies of selfishness and blindness,

Fools as they inscribe their names in History books,

Wanting we will never forget their new Cromwells

Their Model Armies. Bad cess to them and theirs!

Would that I were a Kościuszko or a Gerry Adams,

Or even a Ned Kelly with revolving pistol in hand,

I would break down Mountjoy’s unhappy walls

Raise the green banner and liberate the land!

 

                                    ***

 

Notes:

 

Enoch Burke: This case has been running for several years now when an Irish schoolteacher has been imprisoned several times for quite properly refusing to acknowledge transgenderism and use a student’s preferred pronouns. His mother and sister have been supportive, and likewise running foul of the courts. He has been variously incarcerated at Mountjoy and Castlerea Prisons. Apparently, Burke is a difficult man, even for some of his fellow evangelicals.

 

6 Antipodes: Australia

7 True story

10 It is said that an O’Reilly squire managed to keep his considerable estates by marrying a Miss Nugent & taking her surname. The Nugents allied themselves with the lowland Scottish magnates, the Maxwells, who took lands in Co. Cavan & sent compliant young families to be working their mills in Paisley, across the waters. Less compliant lads were sent abroad on trumped up charges.

14 Webb’s Creek is a remote settlement about 3 hours drive inland from Sydney.

15 Seamus Heaney (1939 – 1913) a great poet, by any measure.

19 – 21 ‘Clearances’, The Haw Lantern, Faber, London, 1987.

38 Garth Boomer (South Australia 1940  – 1993), a teacher who took on board much of the developments of the Swinging 1960s in the teaching of English Language & literature & especially Drama. Some of it quite valid, but accompanied by much fluffery.

41 ‘The obscure American’ was Jerome Bruner (1915 – 2016).

50 Eventually, I became English Coordinator at a school.

72 Various judges have been at work on this man. One High Court justice snidely claimed ‘the rule of law applied to the Burkes whether they accepted it or not’ and in March 2026 had his family incarcerated!

90 Burke is a Norman-Irish family of great renown. 

90 A nabi is a self-proclaimed prophet, like Marx, or perhaps, St. Paul: basically, a snake oil salesman.

97 Not all of Kościuszko, Gerry Adams & Ned Kelly are necessarily admirable.

100 One can see in the walls of Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, the scars of those very bullets which pierced the souls of Padraic Pearse and his brothers-in-arms.

                                                                        ***

Something heard

 

Something heard in the small hours, untoward.

A heavy footstep on the floor, or a bird twittering,

Hidden deep in the brush fence across the lawn,

Or a back door left unlocked and swinging.

 

Hall clock chiming, coming from the neighbours’

Who dwell on the other side of the brush fence,

Whose children fill the street with raucous clamour.

These long nights, nothing seems to make sense.

 

Even at ten o’clock, just as the Moon began to soar

Over the pines by my backyard, they were at shouting,

Dancing on the roof, and their father did loudly roar,

Then joined in the merriment, a lion singing.

 

There it is again. An exhalation through the corridor.

Perhaps an iron cauldron being stirred and seething

As thirteen frogs and some mushrooms take form.

A homunculus steps out and starts at breathing.

 

                                                **

Letter to Corinna

 

You, with your grandmother, sit patient and kind,

As she natters away the hours, about nothing really,

Hands weaving circles as if already she were blind,

Or weird insects had settled on her thinning crown,

Unfolding for her the sheet to draw out the faces

Of two women sitting across the room, oblivious

To her low hymning as she scratches and erases 

Lines delineating the passage of cares and time:

I see a garden outside the classroom window,

But the summer has been too damp to endow

 

Tomatoes with ripened red fruit, corn to stalk

Against the quickly greying skies, or lemons

To burst bright against the trees’ green bulk:

The women wonder where summer has fled.

Yet you have been out to the farms, blessed

The lambs and calves, gathered wheaten sheaves,

Danced through the night with a floral wreath

Floating like a halo above your auburn tresses:

I see a line of pine trees at the school oval’s edge,

Hear wind over water batter the swaying sedge.

 

She is content now, the portraits are taking form.

You slide back on the chair, stretch like a kitten,

Breasts lifting up in a slow sigh of contented warmth,

Eyelids heavying with the promise of sleep.

Perhaps you are remembering a lover’s kiss,

His sweet aubade before the Matins bell had sounded,

Musk, tobacco and sweat steeped into your bodice,

Knowledge that tomorrow, and tomorrow, will come:

Rain starts pattering on the tin roof, leaves stir,

Shadows skitter past the windows, heavens blur.

 

The tables fall silent, heads inclined, brushes lift.

Flowers bloom and horses gallop along the strand.

You are working on an intricate Möbius strip,

Where lovers are steeped in some silent dream:

Or is it Ophelia’s brook, the endgame of love,

To which all dreams, damned if there’s no faith,

Or if faith itself goes awry, are like a forlorn dove

Sent on a futile errand on the coldest winter night?

Snow is falling, if not here, then in a place nearby,

So cold it’s become, enough to make one cry.

 

Oh! Open your eyes, and smile upon the sphere,

Rise and swish between the aisles with light feet

So this chamber will come alive and fix with cheer,

We’ll turn up the heater, break for a hot cup of tea.

Only now have I noticed your eyes are soft grey,

And the cheekbones are high, and way you carry

Lightly as you step across with the serving tray,

Turn, and lift your chin, regarding me, just so:

Is it an owl I hear, or maybe a summons to dance?

Either way, with these words, I take my chance.

 

                                    ***