A member of Aosdána, Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at Universidade Nova. She has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2018 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award for her 2016 collection, Playing the Octopus. Her most recent collection, The Shark Nursery, was shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025

 

~

 

The Shipping Lanes 

i.m. Derek Mahon

 

It was getting dark when the wind dropped. 

Down on the shore, a shape flew low 

over the stirred up water. A late curlew. 

I thought, ‘I would like to hear that call 

 

when I am dying’, to stay with me 

to the far shore. That is how we are 

craving company. Down the coast, my ship 

is leaving harbour. Her lights are gold bars 

 

on the blue-black water. She moves along 

her path on the crowded highway, headed for 

Valparaíso. While history is passing overhead, 

your small craft slips through unseen.

 

 

Hive

 

Bees have five eyes and cannot see red.

They see the colours they need. Sometimes

they get drunk on their own honey. 

 

As is often the case with drones

when their work is done they are taken

to the edge of the hive to be pushed out.

 

As is often the case with royalty the queen 

controls nothing. She is an egg-laying machine.

None of this is why the metric buzz in the hedge

 

is soothing as a basking shark, nor why

their rare alarms and frantic air defence

remind me of men and women in Gaza 

 

struck by programmed drones, or honeyed

children savaged in their waxen cells, or stolen 

youngsters hacked to pieces on a free weekend.