Three Poems by Jeanna Ní Ríordáin

 

A Schoolboy Dies Mid-Summer

     i.m Shaun McLaughlin 

 

He’d seen it on the news,

The Good Friday Agreement

 

His mother told him it meant peace,

a bright and better future

 

But four months later he was killed,

blown up by a car bomb

 

His father only knew his son,

by the watch he was wearing.

Aftermath

i'm the 29 victims of the Omagh

bombing and their families

 

Every day I see the bomb,

the smoke, the glass, the sirens,

 

The smell of burning flesh, the

blood, the limbs, the chaos,

 

The war-like injuries & scenes

of mass destruction,

 

The sight of my dead wife,

face down in the rubble.

In The Ruins of Gaza

 

In the ruins of Gaza, everything

gets mixed together –

 

Running shoes & bits of lampshades,

Rusty tyres & coloured backpacks,

 

Smashed-in clocks & cordless irons,

Tattered schoolbooks, empty food cans,

 

Fractured skulls & punctured footballs,

Broken windows, blood-stained blankets.

Jeanna Ní Ríordáin is an Irish-language translator from West Cork, Ireland. Her work has been featured in Quarryman Literary Journal, Drawn to the Light Press, Cork Words 3, New Isles Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Swerve, Black Noire Review, Reverie Magazine, Burrow, and Otherwise Engaged Literature and Arts Journal among others.