A Child’s Prayer
By Catherine Nolan and Louise Guilfoyle, Coláiste Mhuire, Johnstown, Kilkenny
I go to bed at night
Praying not to wake in the light
Knowing that people will see my black eyes
When they ask what happened I’m telling them lies.
Walking to school in my raggy clothes
Looking at my shoes and seeing my toes
With a few cracked ribs and a pain in my head
All because I wet the bed.
I’m afraid to go home because I know what is in store
No food in the cupboard just scraps on the floor
What can I do for I’m only a child
Yet I am praying for help all the while.
Loss
By John Smith, Presentation College, Carlow
Being lonely.
Having lost someone, you may never see them again
Mental anguish, not being able to help.
Wanting to help, being too afraid to do so.
Never knowing whether your loved one is warm,
Cold, hungry, safe, or even alive.
Having to imagine the pain they’re in.
What’s going through their minds, unsure
Where they are, where they’re going and
Where they may end up
Alone…
Oksana Sukhanova
By Kate Newmann and students from Sligo Grammar
Oksana Sukhanova: the twenty-seven year-old Ukranian woman who was sleeping rough in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, and whose legs had to be amputated because of frostbite.
The wind gushing around as if it is looking for someone.
The Christmas songs that were playing in the factory.
I am trying to forget about the cold.
I feel sad and frightened of what they are going to do.
I am trying to forget all those hours plucking turkeys in the factory.
As I come from surgery, their puzzled eyes just looking at my legs.
My skin is like a cold coat of ice.
The song that haunts my head is the sound of the first bird on a bright morning while I lay warm in bed.
Do they know it’s Christmas?
I know I’m lonely.
I know my legs hurt.
Things starting to fade.
Deathly silence.
I can see darkness.
I can hear silence.
My skin changes its colour to blue.
I miss everything I ever had.
My legs are suddenly abnormally cold.
I am trying to forget that I have nowhere to go.
What meets my eye is a snow-covered road,
A doorstep glistening with ice,
A muffled buzz of pedestrians
And the splutter of traffic.
The song that haunts my head is Where is the Love?
By the Black Eyed Peas being played inside a house.
- Max Livingstone
Excruciating.
Block the pain.
The voice of the past.
The desolate grey of this new world.
The silence of the sleeping town.
Christmas hanging in the air.
My skin crawls with sadness.
- Jordana Lyden-Swift
I have no one here.
The dirty streets are now my home.
Deadly feeling in my body.
Childhood songs I can’t forget.
My skin is numb.
I have no one here.
- Gillian O’Donnell
The large snowflakes falling one-by-one on me.
Every snowflake that lands makes my legs shiver.
It is a white Christmas and the snow is cold.
Yes. I will let them know it’s Christmas time.
- Philip Cunningham
What do you know?
My legs feel bruised, nobody knows me.
What are you trying to forget?
The cold and wind and my old life.
What meets your eyes?
Ignorance staring from passing people, and pity.
What song haunts your head?
Merry Christmas.
What meets your ears?
Wind and people whispering.
What do you miss?
The feeling of being cared for.
What happens to your skin?
It dries up, flakes and dies.
- Ben Perceval
No money, no food and no job.
I am trying to forget the pain in my legs.
I can barely move.
The food in the window of the shop across the road.
- Catriona Wasson
The sound of darkness, of emptiness.
The cold is your company,
All its remarks icy.
Longing for the morning birds.
Cold, groping darkness
Fights for attention.
The sound of silence – hostile, like this town.
The knowledge of what’s going to happen next.
The wind like knives of ice pentrate my skin
And leave it to die.
- Rebecca Marsden
My legs are swollen and sore
And feel like they are not there.
Trying to forget that I have to sleep on the dirty, smelly streets.
People are walking by me like I am not there.
Violins keep playing in my head.
My eyes are closed – all I see is the inside of my eyelids.
My skin is damp and feels so cold against my hands.
The skin on my legs has changed to a different colour.
- Shelley Roe
I know no feeling in my legs.
I know nobody here cares for me – they don’t give a damn if I live or die.
I am trying to forget the fact that I am all alone.
I am thinking hard of some place warm.
My eyes see the dark and frightening alleys.
This is not the land I grew up in.
A bitter silence creeps around, reminding me no one is going to help.
My skin grows colder as the night gets darker.
- Shauna Savage
I know that sunsets can be cruel;
Know the feel of a plucked feather,
The turkey’s pale puckering.
Trying to forget the halt stumble of night,
The lurch of cold towards me.
A broken nursery rhyme haunting my head.
My eyes are met by dull northern stone;
Ears by the church bell’s slow tone.
I miss the cadences that cradled me;
Miss the untaught dance of belonging.
My skin becomes my country,
My exile.
- Kate Newmann
A Mother’s Love
By Colm Bolton, Presentation College, Carlow
A mother’s love for her child
Is waking up early to give cereal
Supply money for school outings,
When he is bold not to shout but to
Sit him down and sort things out.
A mother’s love for her child
Cannot be matched by material things.
She will openly give and arm and a leg and beg
Just to have him back in her arms
Out of harm’s way.
The Cockle Pickers of Morecambe Bay
By Kate Newmann and students from Sligo Grammar
It feels like I’m trapped in a box.
I see the wall of water rising up.
I am a puppet of the sea.
I am tasting a mouth-wash of seaweed.
A still and quiet – like a graveyard.
The smell of bitter salt.
Howling winds and powerful waves.
Surreal.
Unwelcome to this strange land.
I can feel the mounting tide of pressure.
Dryness, rough like sandpaper on the roof of my mouth.
The wind and sea in the swirling torment of my mind.
Low roaring which fades to hissing.
My mouth tickles – permanently dry.
Burning on the roof of my mouth, taste of near death.
Faintly, like through glass, crashing, unforgiving waves.
Smells something salty.
Very wide sea and a horizon like eternal.
- Yukiko Okudaira
It smells like freedom and slavery together.
You can’t see where the sky begins and the water ends.
It tastes like fear.
You can hear only silence.
It feels like a place you will stay in forever.
- Vladimir Dubrovsky
Rotten, putrid, sickening.
A wall, never ending, which won’t stop.
Brain freeze.
Blinding pain as you go numb.
Slowly slipping out of consciousness.
The taste of death, salt and sand –
Your mouth is full to choking.
Thunder pounding in your ears, that are about to explode.
- Rupert Forrester
A vast blue carpet.
An alien at the mercy of the sea – insignificant.
The odour of life.
- Eamon Keane
It crawls in around me.
It is cold and unforgiving.
It feels cruel and strange.
It brings a taste of fear.
- Alex Kelly
It smells like old fish,
Or when you crack open a rotten egg.
It tastes like water that has been left in a jar –
All salt.
- William Hull
A giant death trap waiting to suck me under.
It has taken total control of my body
And all I can do is wait for it to end.
I hear people calling to me –
A roar of hysteria.
- Kiera Wasson
