Roshni Gallagher

My Grandmother’s Voice
 
 
I recorded her in the kitchen in Matlock,
a steam train passing outside the window
improbably, as she spoke.
 
She said, ‘Because my grandmother was there 
with me. I said granny what you doing here?
I said what you doing here?’
 
Not for the words but the sound,
the familiar trace of Creole
working through the vowels of her English,
 
the corridors of her sentences.
I felt the urge to store it as evidence,
as something permanent to share with you. 
 
Her voice travelling in the darkness 
of my coat pocket. 
Listening again with you, my love,
 
was like pressing an ear to the kitchen door. 
Remembering my palm on the table,
and the chair I was sitting on. 
 
The strangeness of hearing my own breath 
recorded. And I remembered too, 
listening to a recording of you 
 
and some friends playing guitar. 
And when I heard your voice 
interrupt the music
 
it stirred something in me 
and, before thinking,
I recognised it as myself speaking.


*


A stranger at Foley’s bar
 
 
recognises mum and tells her that he has 
her grandmother’s hearth stone at his house. 
 
Stored in his garage. The stone she lit fires on 
to cook each meal up in the Ox Mountains. 
 
There’s something holy about this last sign of her. 
A monument like the megalithic tombs of Carrowmore, 
 
or the passage grave of Maeve’s Cairn on Knocknarea 
that looks like rubble from the fields below. 
 
A landmark and a symbol of the strength
of a people, that they could shift and manipulate 
 
the skyline. The same strength it would take 
to build a sod house or strike up a fire 
 
each day out of the damp. 
How are we related, this stranger and I? 
 
I return and return to her stone, 
as to other stones of the mind. 
 
The true shape of it unknown and undisturbed, 
like the silence at the centre of the cairn.


*


In her childhood
Guyana, 1920
 
 
my mother lit fires 
from discs of cow dung, as crows 
billowed like smoke above marble stairs.
 
It was her whole village. Or 
it was a whole village far away from hers 
that fled hunger for indenture. 
 
She was Brahmin or she was Dalit 
or she was a child or she was a sex worker. 
She signed her name X.
 
I was the palest and the eldest.
In my childhood, 
she lit fires from the husks of coconut.
 
In the gully of the rice fields
she taught me to name 
Weedy rice, Worm rice, Writer’s Coat.
 
Taught me to pull plants out 
of shallow water. 
Taught me that the rice fields 
 
swallowed the cries of many women.
Between palmate leaves, my mother 
stood with flowers stitched in her white skirts.
 
I was the palest.
 
In the leaves 
my mother 
 
with flowers 
in her skirts.


*


Bird Cherry
 
 
To teach myself belonging
I try to find the name 
of the blossom tree darkening 
by the window.
Bird cherry or sweet cherry –  
from the curve of its leaves 
I hold each possibility of its ungrown
berries in my mind.
 
If I met my great-great grandmother
I wouldn’t know the name 
of the language she spoke. 
Bird cherry or sweet cherry. 
In the dusk, the petals fall in drifts 
like sea foam.
The soil remembers
everything it used to be –
carbon, fracture, petal.
Last month, the full white blossoms 
swelled and blotted out the sky.


*


My Granny Dreams of Guyana
 
 
My granny looks at me and sees herself.
 
Her living room full of glasses, half drunk.
Pictures of gods hang above the bed. She listens
 
to a record spinning out in another room,
                        another house. 
 
                        The rant of rain on begonias.
                        Mangrove and wood slats. The parrot’s asleep.
 
Things change. 
I try to pull quiet in to cover us.   
                        The walls sing.
 
She looks at me 
and sees herself 
                        in the slant moon,
                        the water,
                        the waning bank.

I   The Silence at the Centre of the Cairn
11 My Grandmother’s Voice
13 Heaven
14 A stranger at Foley’s bar
15 Watching the Water
17 The Wall Duck
19 Kaieteur Falls
20 Jhumka
21 The Whitby
 
II   Even the Trees
25 Kala Pani
 
III   There Is No Pain Like This Body
39 The Wind
40 A Panel of Irish Writers of Colour Discuss Racism
41 Harlaw Reservoir
42 Taxonomy
43 Talisman to Take Flight
44 Ruby-Topaz Hummingbird Necklace
46 Ma Runs into the Rainforest at Night
48 In her childhood
50 North Berwick Law
51 Dock Leaves
52 The Swans
54 The Dales Way
 
IV   Swimming with Strangers
59 Bird Cherry
60 Cycling the Bog Road Out of Tubbercurry
62 Walking in Yellow
63 Outside Tubbercurry
64 Bluebird Day
66 Adder
68 Gothenburg in January
69 Swimming with Strangers
 
V   There Is No Happiness Higher Than Rest
79 Understood
80 Passing Place
81 Threshold
82 The Banana Boat Song at My Grandfather’s Funeral
83 Hermitage of Braid
85 Oysters
86 Hazel Dormouse
87 Heron
88 My Granny Dreams of Guyana
89 Blue
90 Attend
 
93 Cullykhan Bay
 
95 Notes