Irish Poem of the Month: January

Through The Square Window
Sinead Morrissey


In my dream the dead have arrived to wash the windows of my house. There are no blinds to shut them out with.


The clouds above the Lough are stacked like the clouds are stacked above Delft. They have the glutted look of clouds over water.


The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder if it's my son they're after, his effortless breath, his ribbon of years -


but he sleeps on unregarded in his cot, inured, it would seem, quite naturally to the sluicing and battering and paring back of glass


that delivers this shining exterior... One blue boy holds a rag in his teeth between panes like a conjuror.


And then, as suddenly as they came, they go. And there is a horizon from which the clouds stare in,


the massed canopies of Hazelbank, the severed tip of Strangford Peninsula, and a density in the room I find it difficult to breathe in


until I wake, flat on my back with a cork in my mouth. stopper-bottled, in fact, like a herbalist's cure for dropsy.