The Tuesday Poem

Beached Whale - Victoria Kennefick

At first I thought that enormous lump of red-brown on the sand

was the trunk of some ancient, washed-up tree.

It was only when I mounted the object,

digging my little hands into something far too pliable,

that it really hit me, the stale smell of a thousand low tides

and the mute open mouths of the many onlookers

with their hysterical dogs, the seagulls circling like squalling clouds,

my mother’s curlew scream as she ran towards me, disjointed.

Astride the whale like this,

looking at my mother move through dimensions,

planes of distance,

I thought of boutique dressing rooms filled to the brim

with tension and clothes, like gas, expanding. And of two little girls

watching their mother cry at her reflection distorted in a fluorescent mirror.

The weight of her past made flesh on her hips,

the scars of our arrivals barely healed after all this time,

my blind hands all over the body.

Grasping, desperate to hold onto something real,

not knowing what that was.

* Victoria Kennefick is from Shanagarry, Co Cork. She has won the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Red Line Book Festival Prize. Her work has appeared in many periodicals. Her winning chapbook White Whale will be launched at the 2015 Cork Spring Poetry Festival.