Jemma Walsh is an Irish poet based in South East London. She holds a degree in Russian and Classics from Trinity College Dublin. Her work has been published in Crossways Magazine, Re-Side Magazine, The Winnow Magazine and Little Stone Journal. She is currently working on a series of poems exploring issues of identity, gender and linguistics.
twitter:@JemmaWalsh
email: jemmawalsh@gmail.com
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On Pacheco de Melo, Buenos Aires
where snow is a once a century blow-in and bunched up dogs dream of being walked on their own, the sun, like mother’s love, is taken for granted and feels for everything, even the shadows. On Agüero corner, La Porteña serves coffee and medialunas baked in sweet hours when port dwellers sleep in the deep lulling waves that brought them to here, their home. A few doors up some local Italians, who left Il Duce to hang with young Clara, sell freshly made pasta and pesto with walnuts: the pines being found only north of the line ¿viste? Plants hanging on splay floor balconies green, when shutters allow the novelas leak out, young girls covet lips, the therapists thrive and father Gardel sings his pleas into sepia. On Thursdays the steps of the disappeared’s madres walk slowly again outside Casa Rosada. Unheard near the crypts they’re felt anyhow, a nagging trapped nerve in the once refuge nation.
delta greets the dusk
children fall clean from the sky
packaged up neatly
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scope
The moon
is in every
poem, the incomplete
the full. There wends
our fostered rock child,
wonder lit through letters
and pauses. His craters pumice
the rough pages silken, her nude
a veneda in wandering swirls.
And when the Earth dies
what will happen to the moon?
When hand held pens are texture
forgotten and print’s well beyond
any blue retrospective
she may well come round
to much greater things. Meanwhile
we wait, unaware of our waiting.
Some nights clouded cities
and murderous fog, a blank
in their wake, dust sheet The Beauty.
And rascal snow too can blinker
us groundward, to study
our hurrying shooed human feet.
But when distance between
is measured in longing,
dim your bulb eyes, dare
some lyric and howl
for poets write the moonlight,
poems spell flag on
the moon.
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what Beuys whispered to the dead hare
you are earth incarnate, hare
too svelte for the snatch of fingers
even death herself knows
better than to chase
Du nix hare
Du Tartar
you are not a prop
you are the point
that might not tunnel without collapse
I know, I know, it’s a chomp of a chew
what is to do?
I hear I am not what I say
what I say cannot follow
what I have said before
along the ruinous lines of logic
oh limitations! oh, universities!
I am here to heal
hare, you are felt
here in my arms
they’ve forgotten to hear what is felt
one hare tear sounds more truth
than all the echoes of Plato’s caves
if we listen
those Greeks have a lot to answer for
the idea of this honey
was never that to the bees
it is not even sticky to them
but between you and me…
hear this now
I have plans, big plans, get this:
I’m going to plant trees
thousands
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