Issue 1: July 2003

Karen Annesen | Simon Barraclough | Helen Clare | Simon Rees-Roberts | John Stammers | Roisin Tierney

ROISIN TIERNEY

Museum Interview

It wasn't easy, what with all the dead around us,
some of them bearing ankh and some in wigs
and my nerves playing up, although the panel were kind
and offered me water.

Do you mind, they said if we play a game?
And so we played an Egyptian kind
of snakes and ladders. Only this was madder
than any game I'd played before.

The snakes were deities, while the ladders symbolised
ascent into the upper heavens, where the sky queen,
(praise be upon her), performed a sex act on a god,
and there was zero unemployment. No one mentioned filing.

The Head of Department made a swoop across the board,
his dice throws elegant and true. The others followed,
each with a finesse rare in the novitiate. Me, I hadn't a clue,
when all of a sudden I threw a six, jackpot, call it what you will.

And I still remember when that letter, posted full haste
dropped on my floor, saying that I more than most
had made the grade, got the job,
my future shored up for the next year.

I thought of you, me, and Mesopotamia
and how, in that 'cradle of mankind,'
they must've written their poems in cuneiform,
and wondered if the scribes, though well-esteemed,

sometimes sighed over their wedge-shaped pens,
and, looking out beyond the latest Ziggurat
towards the blue horizon, to where poems and dreams
were all mixed up in a glamour of heat and sand,
dedicated their art to this, the first, tiny, civilisation.

Feet

The day we found paws in the kittens' nest in the garden
was the day we set about revenge. But first the funeral —
our childish prayers lethal with intent, Amen.
We heaped dandelions on the tiny mound of earth,
May they rest in peace, and vowed to kill the tom.
JJ Hays had a hurley, and said he'd beat the devil
to within an inch of his striped life. And then we'd find
some rope and hang him in the woods until he swang
without resistance in the breeze. And perhaps cut off his tail.
For murder is a capital offence. We knew the difference
between right and wrong. Yet no cat hung from a tree that summer.

Our tempers cooled, and JJ's brother got leukaemia, and lived.
We generally shaped up, were given shillings not to swear,
or if we did swear, not to take the name of God in vain.
And we always washed on Sundays. The greyhound bitches
did their mother thing and licked away my tears when I cried for mine.
And when the time for baling came, we children sat up high
upon the swaying pile behind the tractor and regally entered the yard.

We dug them up again of course, eager to know if it was true
about Ashes to ashes. Nothing but a pile of mildewed feet
sticky with earth. And by the time the heat of summer
was dwindling and my father had come, as he always did each year
to drive me back to Dublin and to school, we had heard the queen
for several nights, on heat again, early, bawling for more.

Roisin Tierney has been published in Poetry Street, Moonstone, Redbrick Review (NY), Poetry Life and Northwords. She is a contributor to The Virago Book Of Christmas, won a Special Commendation and runner-up prize in the 7th 'How do I love thee?' Open Poetry Competition, and was short-listed for the 2001 TLS Poetry Competition. 'Feet' won a Bridport Prize in 2002. Email: Roisin Tierney.