Two weeks before you die, you take a flight
Leave Africa in darkness for the stark
European light of a new beginning.

Your first time on a plane, first time
To feel the weight of air as coolness
Not the breath of heat.

You are too chilled to shiver, your long limbs
Wrapped up for protection, as if you matter,
As if somebody cares.

Soon everybody wants you, calls out your name
Naming a price, strangers put you in a vehicle, roads,
Then ferries carry you away.

Within days, your final destination - a hotel, a private suite
With bed and silver vase - nobody sees you but the maid
For a whole 8 days.

When you die, there are no mourners and no funeral,
Why should there be? You are a rose,
You are one in every three.*

©  Helena Nolan

The life and death of a rose
* One in every three roses sold originates in Kenya and lives for 44 days from bud to death, the last 8 of which are usually spent in a vase.
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Helena's work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including; The Stinging Fly, The Moth, and the Spoken Ink audio website. Last year she was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Award.

They became unwilling sailors first and then, submariners,

These farmers and shopkeepers, their children, servants, wives,

All suddenly captives of the ocean, all lost in chains,

Buried beneath the sky, the sea, until the murky earth

Reclaimed them and grew fossils in a rib-shaped cage

Of rotting wood and iron and torn sails. They slept for centuries

Like fishermen decaying in too far-flung, careless nets,

Caught up by ankle or by throat, the salt upon them a preservative

So that today we find them, like the next page in a book-



-turned over in astonishment, a copperplate illusion

Of some smothered truth, mute heralds of the future

From a dim-lit past, such buried kisses, fuel for a candle flame

That flickers in the empty dark we rummage in for energy,

Like a faint light at the back of the deepest cave.

If they could speak, these souls might sing in unison:

Forget us at your peril, we are the last of the bravado

We are what remains, and if you hold a hand to us

We’ll surely burn you,

one,

by one,

by name.

©  Helena Nolan

Ancient remains found in Dublin
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Helena's work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including; The Stinging Fly, The Moth, and the Spoken Ink audio website. Last year she was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Award.
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Editor's note: Each day, we move about the land, but how often are we conscious of the layered history beneath our feet?

Speak Other Voices

(The last Poetry Now Festival, Dun Laoghaire, March 2011)



Speak other voices

From other mouths,

Mouths that shape the language

Of other countries, other lives.



We know nothing about each other

But we know these words -

The ones that makes the sssss

The ones that make the oooos –



The suck and pull of sibilants

The essence of the vowels

The soft touch of emotion

The sucker puncher verbs



The humour and the sorrow

Self-deprecating veins

The quick flick of an eyebrow

The slow burn of the page.



We are always, always watching

And listening for the sign.

Here, we find the signals everywhere

Their words, your words, are mine.

©  Helena Nolan

Heaney wins 'Irish Times' poetry award
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Helena Nolan's poems and short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and literary magazines including; The Stinging Fly, Abridged and The Moth, as well as on the Spoken Ink audio website and The Guardian Poetry Workshop. Last year she was shortlisted for Strokestown, runner up in the Fish poetry competition and came second in the Patrick Kavanagh Award. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCD (2008).