Three Poems by Katy Mahon

A Balcony at the Irish Embassy

On this Parisian ledge, balanced somewhere
between the earth and the flight of birds

I lift my wine glass in line
with the balustrade and notice

the wrought iron sway above hedge
and roses made lucent by a May sun.

Above the wide gaze of waiting people,
plumes of cigarette smoke rise

like feathers from a hat and drift
across boulevards and pollarded trees.

In this mobile city of vertical and horizontal
I extend a steadying hand,

touch the meandering railing panel.
At this giddy height I learn that anything is possible —

that groundless fear can be transformed
like heated iron hammered and bent into beauty.

The Churchyard Reader

Silent ashes blow over a mossy solitude
below a bench and stones gnawed by time.
Sun-soft arches swim with yew and crows.

The residue of many psyches lingers
in the spiky undergrowth where shadows
meet the light. A widow,

bowing over silent stories, knows —
fingers damp with grip and dew —
that many breaths move many pages.

She presses whorls into paper edges,
embeds letters in her skin. The light
changes the paper to ochre from snow.

Donegal, after twilight

nights blacker than sodden peat
stars the only light
a mud-drenched climb to a craggy house

blackened sheep on a barren land
my brother racing over bog
to gain, he thinks, the upper hand

a concoction of exhilaration and fear
of the treacherous bog
my excuse for coming last

in wild runs along mountain tracks
sliding to the valley, fast
and back up to the stone-dark house

Katy Mahon is a Northern Irish musician and poet brought up in London and living in York. Her poems have appeared in various Irish and English journals, most recently Dreich, Black Nore Review, and Free the Verse, and she was New Irish Writing’s featured poet for the Review section of the Irish Independent in February 2022. Katy’s debut chapbook, Some Indefinable Cord, was published by Hybriddreich in June 2022.