Before breakfast we’d kneel
on the kitchen tiles for prayers,
then listen to our father
read a lesson from the blue bible
with sticking plaster along its spine,
a picture beside each story.
We took turns to choose:
the Good Samaritan,
Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree,
the loaves and fishes that grew
and grew to feed the multitudes.
Stories for people who worked the soil,
who watched over flocks of sheep.
We knew those people,
we knew the rain that ruined crops,
the seed that fell on stony ground,
the days when hope,
like a restless heifer, goes astray.
Jane Clarke, who was born in Roscommon and lives in Wicklow, combines writing with her work as a management consultant. Twice shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards, she won the Listowel Writer’s Week Poetry Collection Prize (2014), the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010) and Listowel Writers Week (2007). Her first collection, The River, will be published by Bloodaxe Books this year
