Tornado

Sultry all day, the crowds have retired to their snoring or
            to tearing one another asunder.
   From the whitewashed bar, the last along the coast road,
                         the twister looks benign,
                          painted even, tidy brush strokes
                     in textured creams and accents:
                      if it moves it does so slyly. Not a breath
                                 of wind in it today
                       you might conjure the dead to say;
           now don’t breathe a word of it.
                           As a man pours a drink into silence
                              a gecko lightens itself along a wall,
                               a word like a charge
                         roars itself across the sea;
                          no one can hear it yet,
                not the barman,
                not the gecko,
       not me.

Whites and Shadows

“ar scáth a chéile a mhairimíd.”

A larger than life
silhouette on the bank

has Balsam leaves
in its head

The torso is semi see-through
made of soft troughs

of malleable, mucky earth
and a skim of water

reflects light stories
of the leaves on the trees overhead

White butterflies gather
and scatter on it

settle and flicker
in a skittish, girlish flutter

This shadow is old
but I am younger

I am filled with a talent
for laughter

as we live in the shelter
of each other

Cliona O’Connell’s debut collection of poetry, White Space, was published in 2012. She has been runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Award, selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions and shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards. Cliona has a masters in Poetry Studies from DCU and in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. These two poems were first published in Channel Issue 1.