_______________________________________________________________________
Deposition
I love you the way waves love cliffs.
They fling lace skirts against rock,
can-can kicks rush the top,
fall back down; froth clings—a kiss.
Sometimes they wash worn things to shore;
sometimes, they roll silent, say nothing,
tunnel under, hide in echo-dark—
wait until there’s a horizon.
I love you in this way because
you are a planet in space that orbits
the sun coolly, allows for oceans.
I love you in this way because
you let me moon about as a pond,
or thrash and flail over piers.
You scoop me up, stone and soil,
sand I’ve made for you.
I love you, don’t mind if I whip in your eye,
erode a piece, I’ll make up for it –
silt and foam, my wedding dress;
spray and salt, my veil, bouquet of blue nets.
I love you because without you there is just sea;
a body all at sea, waving surrender to sky,
kicking and screaming against the line—
water, not going anywhere.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Victoria Kennefick's debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. A UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-23, Victoria is now Cork County Council Writer-in-Residence 2024. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a PBS Choice for Spring 2024 and BBC Poetry Extra Book of the Month for March.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Claude Monet, Rough Sea at Étretat, 1883. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon