Easier Day
by
Hugh O'Conor
© 2018.
Hugh O'Conor is an Irish actor, photographer and writer/director. You can purchase a special edition print of this photograph at Take Heart Pop Up Art, all proceeds to Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.
- In the eyes of another: Stern. Taciturn. Bitter. Firm.
- Beyond a window, a face, sink-blurred. She rubs spoons underwater, mouth downturned.
- A teenager grits her teeth when a stranger sneers: Cheer up love, give us a grin.
- Tongueless, the laundress draws silence from steam, hauling the wordless heft of scald, scrape, deformity.
- Examined by soldiers, she won’t speak. Interrogated by more, her curls twist in a stranger’s fist. White, white, her lips clench so tight, until shears give her hair flight.
- A century of silence, in which little changes. Her granddaughter’s words will be swallowed, still, unspilled.
- Inheritance: each female syllable is bitten, held imprisoned. Until it isn’t.
- Silence in brine: saline. The sight of fish tails set for pickling, five in a line.
- Intersection of time and desire: the sunken clock will swallow its tock-tick only if the river spills its captive. Sacrament.
- The silence of knives. The kitchen, so quiet. Slice. Slice. Slice. Slice.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s most recent book is ‘Oighear.’ Among her awards are the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and most recently, the Ostana Prize (Italy). This poem features in ‘9 Silences,’ a collaboration with Alice Maher, soon to be published by The Salvage Press.
