BAKING WREATH
If it were a question, I would create
a language, answer from this poem
that is not voice: words are shovels
of familiar sounds we dig escape routes.
We’ve come so far without you,
sprouting each spring like adolescent bulbs
left to winter alone, heads
all wilful promise — crowns emerging
through old ground. We know folly;
how life resembles the aftermath
of a disappointing storm once damage
has passed overhead. And baking loaves isn’t
about how well they rise or crumble,
more the anticipation of miracles. I’m gardening
from the kitchen window, prising
sticky flour from fingers, then a thorn.
CONFETTI
Gifted a bouquet of lavender bound
in green twine, I am navigating
the streets of a place I am lost in,
offering the moody cathedral’s
gun metal steeple our tone
behind this city’s summer skyline.
A prayer in the guise of a wreath:
Violet whorls sprinkled to the heavens
holding you in permanent cloud,
fragrance delicate as my belief,
your picture wrapped
in cling-film inside my handbag,
a faint glimpse of you as I reach
for my phone to capture
the spire piercing the belly of dusk.
And here, under a gang of crows
eyeing my pointless gift,
fluttering their black capes over
this purple moment, I inhale
your wild will, a chaotic residue
landing as confetti on my hair.
Maeve McKenna lives in rural Sligo, Ireland. She is the author of two pamphlets, A Dedication to Drowning, published in February 2022 and Body as a Home for this Darkness, published in September 2023. She is studying for an MA in poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.