after Seamus Heaney’s ‘Postscript’
We have gone to Ballycotton
where the ocean on one side is wild
and wilder still is the sum of six Irish miles,
the bus’s departure four minutes to the hour,
five sandwiches for the three of us,
the only lifeboat to receive a gold medal,
the children of those it saved,
the angle of the lighthouse, the missing
degrees of blue in the blink of sky,
the sun, your marriage of thirty-one days,
the spirals of the bales of hay.
Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania and has lived in Belfast since 2017. She has a PhD in poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. A recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, she published her debut pamphlet Charm for Catching a Train in 2022 (Green Bottle Press). Her writing about Bridget Cleary has been supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust.
More work by Milena Williamson
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