Over. Protective.
You took it tight to you
Before it got the air
And held it too tight
Until, unbreathing, you set it down.
Now, blind to the desecration,
You shake it angrily by the leg
And scream
Why won't my baby dance?
The Skirt
Pity the skirt
Symbol of triangled femininity
A line dividing those who sit and stand to pee
Drawn tight to bind the knee
So that the wearer cannot run,
Or draping between feet
To make a hazard of stairs
So that the wearer cannot rise.
Oppression in a floral disguise.
Subvert the skirt, recut the cloth.
She used to be for warriors,
Loose cut for kicking,
Swinging over a horse
Or a flirty twirl on the dance floor
Genderless and powerful.
All this with only one seam.
True, they’re cold without a pair of tights
But don’t forget they’re also good in fights
And not a fibre stands against women’s rights.
Raise your hemlines to the skirt!
She carries a lot of baggage
In the pockets she doesn’t have
Pride
Some say pride is a protest.
First and last, a protest.
Harshly they say it through gritted teeth
As though the idea of pride as something so silly as a celebration abrades it’s worth.
And it is. Pride is a protest.
But it is a celebration too - a party.
An access of joy.
Even if it sometimes feels like they tore up your invitation like Cinderella
And left you in the ashes excised from history,
Pride is your fairy godmother, find your tribe in her bosom and let them tell you your rags look fucking stunning
And share a glass shoe from Penneys that almost fits.
This matters too.
At Stonewall, as the fighting raged, they wore flower crowns and brought their record players
And shared wine and stole kisses
And danced and twirled amidst the breaking glass.
When you cannot walk down the street without defiance
When the colour of your skin or the way you style your hair
Or the way you walk with the undulating sensuality of a young Sophia Loren
Is innate and inescapable and who you are
Then every day is a protest
Every step burdened with worry
Every gaze met carries potential confrontation
And pride is the day when you can draw a breath
Deep, sustaining,
That doesn’t hitch with fear
And scream delight and hear
Warm, kind, exhausted,
Yet rejuvenated in the pulsing disco ball reflected light,
That you are not alone.
Dance today.
Pride was born a Protest,
But she was conceived in love.
Nuts
Allergens did not declare themselves when I was young
Things contained what they contained in private silence
And we blindly swallowed what life gave
Most of us were fine
And those unusual children
Who suffocated
On the snickers of their peers
Were not discussed
Now allergens cry out in Bold
And even nuts
Who are clearly nuts
Coyly declare that they may contain nuts
In performative allyship.
Closing Time Customer
At five to theoretical liberty
You slither in before the door is llocked
And seeing that the shelves are all well stocked
Begin to chat without a fear of scarcity
Or shrinking from my growing tersity
If my eyes contain a yes
It is only because that’s how you spell eyes.
Cut
Once all this was trees. Most of our island was covered with oak forests. Cathedraled arcs of intertwining branches sheltered us. We hunted in the green shadows and we prospered.
Then we were settled
And we settled for it. We learned that the forests were wild. We learned that we were savage.
And we cut away.
Cut away the forests. Cut to a bright new vista where the trees have been cleared for a new civilisation, and the savages have no food, and the ecosystem is broken but it’s OK because we can get food from the settlers if we just cut away a little more.
Cut away our stories. A goddess held open in grinning fecundity doesn’t fit, give her a broom to occupy her wild hands and make her a saint of placid domesticity. Take all our gods and goddesses and fairies and heroes and cut away their stories leaving saints and saints and saints and saints and no significance.
Cut away at our women. You told warriors that had grown strong in the oak’s shade that they had been damned by the fruit of another tree and must be small and weak in atonement. We cut our Maedbhs into maids to fit the shape of woman in a new language and we cut her and cut her until she was cutting at herself and then we banned the bean for her own safety and cut away her agency.
Cut away our lover poets and our lovers and our poets. Cut the language from our mouths and the men from our beds. Give us silence and shame and let the shame grow to fill the silence that used to fall between the trees.
Cut to us stripped of all we were, standing starving in the smallest field staring, wild with hunger, into the bald bare sky and dreaming of branches and goddesses. Cut our ties and set out to sea or stay and cut the crops we’ll never be clean enough to eat while our children cut their teeth on grass?
ENOUGH.
We can’t cut at nothing and must grow. Our trees are still bare but our roots are deep, growing under the fields in darkness, dauntless courage and biding constancy.
Our day will come when we can pick up all we’ve cut away, and, taking it lightly on one shoulder, join hands and walk back into the fresh green shadows.
Leaves.
Us.
Alone.
An Phéist Talún
Is cuma leis an bpéist talún má chuireann siad tobathrú ort.
Sleamhain agus tais le múcas slaodach
Téann siad tríd an ithir
Ag tógáil istigh gach rud atá go maith
Agus ag fágáil do dhiúltachas go léir ina ndiaidh.
Cuireann an próiseas seo aer san ithir
Mar sin is féidir le rudaí fás -
Rudaí a a uait cosúil le barraí agus bláthanna -
Ach níl an péist talún á dhéanamh duitse.
Is cuma leis an bpéist talún.
Is rud contúirteach é a bheith le feiceáil
Nuair is péist talún thú,
Béile éasca d’éin agus and do volta
Agus cineál áirithe leanaí.
Is rud an-deacair é a bheith i bpéist talún.
Is cuma leis an bpéist talún.
Cuirfidh an péist talún cóta de smuga orthu féin ar laethanta báistí
Agus pléasctha as an talamh chun grá a dhéanamh i measc na deora fhearthainne,
Nó damhsa le áthas
Cosúil le Drew Barrymore, ach sorcóireach.
Is rud an-iontach é a bheith i bpéist talún.
Is cuma leis an bpéist talún má chuireann siad tobathrú ort.
Lá éigin beidh a mbolg sleamhnánach ina uaigh agat.
Is cuma leis an bpéist talún.
Naomh
They say he banished us.
As if he could, some stuck up sexless little saint
Trying to paint us out of history and taint our good name
When he’s the wee scut that would faint
if you so much as hissed at him.
It pissed us off actually,
This supercilious sham of a seanchaí
Claiming the concept of a trinity and explaining it
With his wilted little shamrock
When our divinities had been trifold,
Carved into stones and rocks, for an infinity
Before his fancy new saviour was even in his infancy.
He said he sold sagacity to savages:
A myth to satisfy his sterile sensibilities.
We hissed and sighed and started our slow slide
Into invisibility.
You know Sheelagh?
Holds herself open, nice god, not much shame.
He took her name and stuck it on a saint of housework
His stories say she may have been his mother or his wife.
She was screwed either way, and not by him.
He never pleased a woman in his life.
He took poor Bríd, three sister goddesses
And stuffed her into one tight saintly bodice
Then weighted her down with humility
And modestness
Enough to bend her knees
And press her belly to the earth.
Casting her down with the snakes
When she was worth three of him.
Buouyed by these successes,
He took sapphics and sodomites.
Who used to be within their rights to enjoy their nights
And said he was sickened by their caresses,
Turned families against them, made them lesser,
And put them under such stresses
They couldn’t even say their esses
For fear of discovery.
He made them secret and scared
And said that the only recovery was through prayer
When they were never sick
He just reallly didn’t like quares
And, in similar unfairness,
Wasn’t keen on curves, or skirts or longer hair.
A woman’s place is nun or none, if she wears
Anything but a bad habit she’s asking for it
And for asking he took everything that was theirs,
Dragged them off to scrub stairs
And endure judgemental glares
From righteous prayerful women,
Pure enough not to spare the rod.
Like the knickers they washed,
The poor dares had the absolute
Shite beat out of them.
Children too.
He slipped it into schools.
His church, that is,
Though with this tool in place
It wasn’t long before they were slipping it in disgracefuly
Knowing the lickspittles in power would faithfully
Grant acquittals, having been beaten around the faces
When they were little so they know their places.
His predators and perverts basically seal up their secrets
Behind church gates under their own dogmatic laws
So they could get their preaching paws
On generations of children.
Kids they slapped, starved and raped,
And those who escaped
He claimed to banish.
Generations vanished,
Sick of the sight of him
And he only delighted with no one to fight him.
The might of his mitre got mightier
But we were growing in the shadows, getting snakier and bitier.
Not banished, only driven out of sight
And we were losing our patience.
We never claimed to be saints.
We have weighed him in our scales
And found him wanting, so we’re biting back.
Not with fangs full of poison, or the swift kick in the sack
He so richly deserves. Just small acts of reclamation.
These pale against centuries of degradation
But retaliation only hurts our hurting nation
And we’d rather get on with a bit of self celebration.
We joined his parade, our shining bodies throwing shapes
In defiant exultation, not snakily sneaking in but openly snaking in formation,
Making them ours. It isn’t hard to outdance a celibate.
Without need of proclamation, we were centre stage
As soon as we left the shadows, and so for the already damned to hell of it
We tore up his laws. Not all the laws, not willy nilly,
Just the ones that were harmful or silly.
We freed the women and the gays,
Made what we could more equal.
We’ve a ways to go yet but we’re back out in the open
Cleaning up the messes
And ready to choke the life out of any sneaky saint
That tries to pull a sequel.
We’ll pass on that.
You can hiss
Our esses.
Ts.
Roe v Wade Blues
Stop all the clocks, turn back the hands,
Yield hard won rights to the right’s demands
Split women from women on ludicrous bases
The shapes of their forms and the hues of their faces
Let fear be a spear that pierces compassion
Stamp down on the weak in the zealots fashion
Shout over dissenters, cut off their voices,
Make bodies and lives bend to personal choices.
Reopen old fights that were already fighted
Tear apart all that was good and united
Wake up old myths and burn all the new witches
For fear of the queer that they keep in their britches
Sharpen your nails and scratch out the trans
Turn the fight from the right and yield ground to the mans
Pour away your freedoms hardwon in blood
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Another Eden
They want another Eden.
A return to old fashioned values.
A funny old world where we are all the same.
A simpler time when there was just one man.
Sitting in a garden. Fucking his rib.
No funny stuff.
They want to unbite the fruit
And return to a world without knowledge
But they cannot go back.
The vertebra has burnt her bra,
Got off her back, and learned her worth.
The bitten fruit has learned it’s flavour
And wildly thrown its seeds across the earth.
They get on bended knees and dig and dig,
For they have no room for such weeds in a perfect garden,
But still the flowers grow.
They shout in shame and shake the trees
And crush the fruit beneath their heels,
But though it bleeds, it also spreads the seeds
And grows anew,
And will not let them have
Another Eden.
To the Daughter of a Witch they couldn't burn
Dear daughter of a witch they couldn’t burn,
Do not define your sisters by the flames,
For they were witches too, as free as you,
They danced beneath the moon and they had names.
There were no witches that they couldn’t burn,
Just those they burned and those that got away,
And those they burned should never be ashamed,
And those that burned them should be brought to pay.
Join with the children of the witches burned.
Destroy the foes that sanctioned witches’ slaughter
And never again let your lives return
To fear, for you are all strong witches’ daughters.
No subjugating force should turn, through fire,
A woman’s life into her funeral pyre.