Medbh McGuckian - Two Poems From 'The Flower Master' (published 1982)

That Year

That year it was something to do with your hands:
To play about with rings, to harness rhythm
In staging bleach or henna on the hair,
Or shackling, unshackling the breasts.

I remembered as a child the red kite
Lost forever over our heads, the white ball
A pin-prick on the tide, and studied
the leaf-patterned linoleum, the eleborate

Stitches on my pleated bodice.
It was like a bee's sting or a bullet
Left in me, this mark, this sticking pins in dolls,
Listening for the red and white

Particles of time to trickle slow, like a wet nurse
Feeding nonchalantly someone else's child.
I wanted curtainings, and cushionings,
The grass is no bed after dark.

Mr McGregor's Garden

Some women save their sanity with needles.
I complicate my life with studies
Of my favourite rabbit's head, his vulgar volatility,
Or a little ladylike sketching
Of my resident toad in his flannel box;
Or search for handsome fungi for my tropical
Herbarium, growing dry-rot in the garden,
And wishing that the climate were kinder,
Turning over the spiky purple heads among the moss
With my cheese-knife to view the slimy veil.

Unlike the cupboard-love of sleepers in the siding,
My hedgehog's sleep is under his control
And not the weather's; he can rouse himself
At half-an-hour's notice in the frost, or leave at will
On a wet day in August, by the hearth.
He goes by breathing slowly, after a large meal,
A lively evening, very cross if interrupted,
And returns with a hundred respirations
To the minute, weak and nervous when he wakens,
Busy with his laundry.

On sleepless nights while learning
Shakespeare off by heart,
I feel that Bunny's at my bedside
In a white cotton nightcap,
Tickling me with his whiskers.

Medbh McGuckian (1950)
Is an Irish poetess who has published several books of poetry and won numerous awards, including an Ireland Arts Council Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Cheltenham Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She was also the first woman to hold the Writer-in-Residence position at Queen’s University.
McGuckian currently lives in Belfast with her husband and children, and is a professor of English at Queen’s University.


portrait by Jeffrey Morgan