POEM OF THE WEEK

Here I Be !

South of the buzzing

of a hairy bumble bee

North of the big dog’s bark

West of the breeze

tickling cherry blossom trees

East of the sunlight

stealing over the fields

that’s where

you will

find me.

By : Donall Dempsey

Footnote : My little girl's sense of where she was...as if it were written in the sky and the world was simply there to do her bidding. She used her own personal coordinates to bring in a thought to land.

"Where were you Tilly?" I asked innocently. "I was by the big cloud pretending to be a tiger beside the worm...look!" And with that she produced the worm she had been hiding behind her back. So she had gone to the bottom of the garden...hopefully not to eat 'em.

So I thought I also would get my bearings the three year old Tilly way! I was singing Ariel's "Where the bee sucks there suck I..." so I guess this got cross-pollinated with where and who I was. It takes a little girl to teach one how to live in the world in the rightest of ways.

Biography : Dónall Dempsey was born in the Curragh of Kildare, Ireland, and was Ireland’s first Poet in Residence in a secondary school. He has read on Irish radio and appeared on TV there. He moved to London in 1986 and has continued to write and perform his poetry ever since. He is well known for his dynamic delivery when reading, his surreal imagery and his tenderness, a poet in love with the world. He has a strong presence online, and publishes a poem every day on Facebook, Twitter and in online groups. In pre-covid days, he was to be found at poetry festivals in France, New Delhi, Ireland, the Edinburgh Free Fringe, Cheltenham and Swindon, among others. Dónall’s poetry has been published in numerous magazines, anthologies and journals, both online and in print. He has published five collections, Sifting Shape into Sound, Being Dragged Across the Carpet by the Cat, The Smell of Purple in 2013, and Gerry Sweeney’s Mammy, and Crawling Out and Falling Up, the fifth, which was published in November 2020.