Liz McSkeane - Invasion

from One Minute Poems by Rancid Idols Productions

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lyrics

Invasion

Uniform: one old coat, pockets sewn
inside the lining. Mode of transport: bike.
Route: along the stony laneway that winds
behind the house, through fields and hedgerows
from Clontibret to the Dandy’s in Armagh.
Our mission: smuggle butter from the North;
give customs men and soldiers a wide berth,
too young to wonder who the strangers are,
where the accent’s from or who they might be
looking for. Weren’t we supposed to be done
with all that palaver? Good riddance, Prods
and Taigs alike said. Now it looks like free
movement, for us, won’t survive the London
bother, here, stuck in the crossfire of gods.

credits

from One Minute Poems, released October 6, 2022
'Invasion' was published in the 2018 anthology, The Lea-Green Down Edited by Eileen Casey, published by Flaming Arrow Press as a homage to the poet Patrick Kavanagh. Writers were invited to select a favourite poem by Kavanagh and write one in response. Invasion is inspired by the Kavanagh sonnet, Epic.

Liz McSkeane is an Irish/Scottish writer of fiction and poetry based in Dublin, and the founder of Turas Press, which she set up in 2017. In 1999, Liz won the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award for her poetry. Her first novel Canticle, a historical novel set in Golden Age Spain, was a joint winner in the 2016 Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair competition. She has four collections of poetry and her stories and poems have been widely published in Ireland and the UK. Her first collection of short stories, What to Put in a Suitcase, will be published on October 5th 2022 by Turas Press.