Sméara Dubha

Shane Leavy What a year for blackberries! For once, they survive the rain and they bulge, plump, mirrored black and maggot-free. My fngers stain with purple, and my lips, teeth.

I was upset, and running high above the Glencar valley where the forestry road clears to a glade of pine stumps and dragonfies, and frog spawn in pools, squirming with weird, legged tadpoles.

A hot day in late summer, I was drenched, so I slipped my t-shirt off and wedged it in the belt of my shorts and ran sweat-slicked and cooling, swatting off horsefies.

I ran with the joy of late summer in my heart, dissolving my pain in the arcing swallows, the foxgloves, the plump hazels.

Then hunger hit.

How I gorged in the stillness on blackberries, bursting sun-warm in my mouth, all strange sweetness; enchanted.

And whether my bones end here or buried by foreign mountains, that day I was gluttonous, like an infant, ag piocadh sméara dubha.

Chopping back the hedge in late summer

Shane Leavy It’s a day for frogs and daddy long-legs.

My toes and feet are wet, spotted with seeds from grasses, foxgloves, weeds.

Too hot, too wet, to wear a top, so my t-shirt hangs on the holly branch as I snap-snap-snap with the clippers.

Laurel leaves, and thicker laurel branches fall in clusters; cranefies, startled, drift, dragging their heavy feet, and a frog hops, once, stunned in the drenching grass as I carve away the tangle of the hedge, cutting clear the cobwebs of my head.