From ‘Dream of a City’, the anthology published on foot of City of Culture’s Visiting Writers Programme that brought community to world greats in the free environs of Limerick libraries.
This poem ‘The Rub’ is by Paula Meehan. A north city Dub, she went on to Trinity and the MGA programme in Eastern Washington University. A member of Aosdána, Meehan is Ireland professor of poetry 2013-2016.
The relationship below could be between any two women with knowledge of each other but to this hack, it smacks of mother/ daughter breach or the gouge between ill-got in laws. It’s short but steep with the disappointment of generations.
‘The Rub’
It was what she’d say when things got rough/ back there in Thebes Central – the kitchen -/
where it never came out in the wash,/ the one original stain, the sin/ of the fathers spun down through the years.
Every word she hurled could pierce the skin;/ she could talk common, she could talk posh.
I sat like a stone growing lichen.
What didn’t kill me would make me tough.
