The Kaleidoscope My Big Brother Gave Me
It created geometric processions out of rooms:
made a pair of butterflies rise from a fireside chair,
caused a ball of wool to fan and become a guelder-rose,
a cylinder of gas to spoke into a four-pronged star,
eight eyes to glisten from a hot-plate ringed with chrome.
It put my reflection in as part of the pattern: let me see
myself in a pendulum, triangulated by a dour
mahogany surround. He helped me through a gap that year.
Finger to his lips, he slowed the whole summer down,
tuned out tractor drone, dog splash, sheep bleat –
moved in on one grasshopper sound, till we’d dipped
level with the angled systems of the insect’s exterior,
its armoured legs jigging out an oscillating click
that swelled in the field, a chant rising in its cathedral.
I became a juggler of surfaces, an evangelist
of detail, my world broken down, re-configured. I’d take
rubbings from the paint tears hardened down our door, wait
outside, round the narrowing waterline, as polygons
broke out across the mud, baked by the sun.
(from The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards)
Ann Leahy’s first collection The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards, Arlen House, 2008 won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Individual poems have also won national awards (the Poetry on the Wall, and Clogh Writers’ prizes and others) and have twice been commended in the British National Poetry Competition. Her poems have been published widely in journals (Stand, AGENDA, Orbis, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, New Welsh Review and others) and anthologies (Best of Irish Poetry 2010; The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Poetry from Canada and Ireland, 2007 and others). She has taken part in writers’ festivals in Ireland and Germany, and received a Culture Ireland bursary for a reading tour in the U.S. She grew up in Co. Tipperary and lives in Dublin.
andotherpoems.com 