Premier Writing showcases poetry, essays and short fiction by new and emerging Irish writers. This week’s featured poet is Paddy Moran from Tipperary.
Poetry
At Last
She had grown so precarious
her mind was like a boat
that kept bumping off reason’s banks;
her words a fumbling for matches
when the lights go out.
Stock-still there amid all she’d known:
her well-used Lives of the Saints;
spools and patterns, “work in progress”;
the prizes won at shows;
flower beds choked with weeds, matted grass…
A world slipping through outstretched hands.
A voice mustering
old days, and loved ones underground.
A huddle of memories
making a last stand.
Swallows Returning
In these mellowing
April days, the swallows
are returning.
Each journey back is fraught –
insects less abundant;
air and earth more tainted –
yet they home unerringly
to last year’s cup-shaped nests
on beams and ledges.
Like airy acrobats,
they dart and swoop,
tracing miraculous
parabolas and curves
as they whoosh past; blurring
to forked tails, lustrous blue…
Decades after swallows
first entered my spirit,
their giddy flittings,
their chatter under eaves
still infiltrate
my words and musings:
that high, nasal, tinkling
vit-vit-vit charging me,
quivering my innards.
About the author:
Paddy Moran has published four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Reckonings (Salmon Poetry, 2019). A fifth collection, Birding, is forthcoming. He is also featured in Windharp, an anthology of poems written by Irish poets since 1916. Paddy is from Templetuohy, Co. Tipperary, and lives in Dublin .
If you emjoy what we do and you’d like to help support The Loughtagalla Times, you can buy us a coffee here to keep us awake!
Loughtagalla Times 
Leave a comment