By Eilín de Paor

Featured Art: Ormond by Anna Kinney

We’ll give some day,
when the time is right.

Until then we incline, prop like bookends
no one ever bought but found, inherited,

stable as a diving bell on the sea bed,
a lunar drill mining nameless minerals,

strapped with brackets of obsolete gauge,
rusted together—all the sturdier.

We’ll give, after a long stand,
buffeted by shell, rolled in tumble wave,

buckle—grateful for the water’s lean,
slide into sand, become home to shoaling dabfish,

happy to have stood,
in our cockeyed way.

---

Eilín de Paor lives in Dublin, Ireland. Her poems have appeared in The Stony Thursday Book, Banshee, The Waxed Lemon, The Frogmore Papers, 14, Raleigh Review and Belfield Literary Review, among others. Her chapbook, “In the Jitterfritz of Neon”, a collaboration with Damien B. Donnelly, was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press.