Rumour
When a worm murmured its word from under the soil,
Rumour took her place, ear to the ground.
The dead arrived as frost; what they had to say
unheard by the living. But Rumour listened,
and with two new tongues spread what she knew
to a town where voices were many,
where someone’s daughter, out late,
hand-in-hand with a girl, was laughing.
The stones heard everything, muttered
along their walls, and a whisper, held in rock,
was quick to tell the sky. The town sent itself to bed
as Rumour’s noise reached the sea, always busy
repeating what it knows. Then only salt,
lifting Rumour again, till the birds fed it all back
to the earth, where a worm told another,
told the ruins of a woman, who began to laugh.
First published in Poetry Ireland Review
Hericium
If when we die, the soul attaches itself to something half-alive,
mine will settle for forest rot,
drip its thousand spines to a pale spill.
Woodland does not pause at loss,
it lives through its buried —
another hounded fox, the wrong red.
Somewhere, a horse chestnut’s falling pulse
and in the damp, stars yawn into autumn.
Everything and nothing in this wood.
When I become impossibly light, appear as wax,
let foragers steal my ghost-meat home,
prepare a meal of it, slow as winter.
First published in The Rialto
More than Shells
these are the ears of our drowned
who have turned on their sides.
Rather than write your name in the sand with my toes,
I’ll leave it with them, to grow beyond itself;
queer the distance of this beach.
So a girl, not yet walking this shore,
might hold in her hand the before that came and went,
then add to it.
As a fling of sandpipers, teetering at the sea’s lip,
pick buried grub from the wet,
as if discovering their own truths from the earth.
First published in The London Magazine
Death’s longing for the colour green
I have seen her steal a pot of herbs.
I have seen her hook a tree’s reflection from a pond.
All Death’s garden grows is fieldstone, a teasing
of lichen. Briefly, the smell of something alive.
I have seen her hang six woodpeckers
from a cypress branch. Failing green lanterns.
I have seen her pick the unripe berries from the lane.
What she wants is a dress hemmed with catchweed,
is to crawl the hedges for cuckoo spit
and with her thumb, steal a froghopper from the foam.
I am afraid of her bottle flies, her aphids
doing as Death does. Sapping the sweet trees,
the sound of apples all the time vanishing.
First published in The Poetry Review
Ella Duffy 