Poem of the Week: An Exhibition

Remembering Bridget Flannery

People arrive with a coin in fists,
although it’s late and all is paid.
Paintings are propped or hung —
cerulean, washed ivory,
and the blue bleed of her coastlines —

mark a time when the children
were minnows, coming ashore to eat,
or to drape a wet-suit over the bath.
The murmuring crowd trails and curves
out the undertaker’s door to the street.

Within, our lives fill, as if tubes of paint
were squeezed, a painful press of colour
through grief-tight limbs, lungs, bellies.
The great bogs are thickly marked,
bister and ochre with no shape,

sounding the pitch perfect note,
a fluency of knotted peatland,
blackened stems of last year’s heather.
She lists her costings — maternal,
erotic— on boards too large

for a respectable room, signs
she’d taken a wild skite, alizarin
flushing the hemisphere with love.
Now, still fiddling with coins,
we embrace, anxious at the cost,

these hard-won, forgiving beauties
wrung from her living and dying.
By late evening, on the street again,
we blink awake at a purple sky,
the kind she would never paint.

Mary O’Donnell is a poet, short story writer and novelist. A chapbook, Outsiders Always (Southword Editions) was published in 2023.