THERE’s a lot of talk current as to what is marriage, a lot of truck. Who is eligible? What is defining? Who holds what card over whom in the status quo and how will stakes change if the Constitution does?
As a nation we consider what is for better, for worse.
Playwright, poet and critic Mary Coll gives lyrical insight into a longstanding union blessed without tangled legality. Her text is fine goods, the more lovely for everyday surround.
A man dozes, the love does not. We know that ember will flicker and blaze again. Her ‘Tuesday Evening’ is from Limerick City of Culture anthology, Dream of a City.
Tuesday Evening
It is possible for a woman of a certain age to walk into a room/ and finding a man of a certain age sleeping on the sofa/ stop in her tracks while the negative of the boy she loved to the point of distraction floats before her.
In that instant, before she boils water for pasta, she runs over/ what years of the tide going in and out has left her,
the flotsam and jetsam salvaged from the storms,/ what it was like before time took everything that wasn’t tied down,
evenings that came and went, just like this one, where snow fell, or/ nothing at all happened, and nothing of importance was said,
what she has wagered, won, and lost,/ what she has held back, and what she has held on to,
the memory of a girl who could not breathe/ unless it was the same air he was breathing, love’s tiny traces,
the hunger for a royal flush that keeps her at the table.
Astrolabe Press 2014
