Breda Spaight

- Ireland -

Breda Spaight is from Co Limerick. Her debut chapbook, The Untimely Death of My Mother’s Hens, is published by Southword Editions in the New Irish Voices series. Her debut full poetry collection, Watching for the Hawk, is published by Arlen House and shortlisted for the 2024 Farmgate National Poetry Award. In 2023, she was a Forward Prize finalist for Best Single Poem Written. She holds an M.Phil. in creative writing from Trinity College and has participated in the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. Her work has appeared in Southword, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Cyphers, Banshee, and Ambit.

Watching for the Hawk

Breda Spaight’s ‘Watching for the Hawk’ is a collection which voices the silent scream of a painful childhood in old rural Catholic Ireland. At its core is the poet’s mother, a woman oppressed, whose only role is to serve; keep house, bare children, and remain obedient to her husband.

Each poem encapsulates a scene in which the reader is intimately placed amongst the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship wrought with illness, loss, and the unsaid.

The poet does not exploit the quiet hum of rage that simmers within each poem, she deftly curbs sentimentality whilst dissecting the very meat of feeling.

Spaight’s poems are marbled with language that is startling in its craft, they are emboldened by imagery that ploughs into life’s sinews. How curious then, that as a child the poet’s voice went unheard at home where there remained the absence of a shared language with the poet’s mother, and father spoke with a spew of umber and amber vowels.

This collection dismantles the heart and churns the gut with prickling honesty, towards the collection’s end we witness the poet’s acceptance, forgiveness and resounding love for her mother.

Spaight’s poems are tender, shocking, and beautiful— a lot like love.

Róisín Leggett Bohan

More about the poet

Poetry

/ Bacon

I still see her fold in half, one leg ballerina-
raised for balance as she bows into the wooden
barrel for next day’s flitch of bacon.

My brother wears his cowboy suit; black hat,
leatherette waistcoat with fringes across the chest.
His gun holster buckle is the Lone Star.

Meat steeps in a bowl of water overnight.
Salt liquefies; spume rises and floats while
she sleeps in a house of thunder; moths’ furred

bodies pattering the whore-red glow of
the sacred heart lamp on the kitchen window.
The Virginian’s gun is under his pillow.

She slices bacon with her loneliness, the air
marbled various auras of sad: dawn, midnight,
August. The long years of her love like

starlight’s colossal dying. John Wayne
at the kitchen door, I’m the sheriff ‘round here.
Hands in the air, an’ nobody gets hurt.
/ The Suitcase

By now, I’m a collector of secrets.
I seek mute corners, sift dream from the half-remembered,
meaning from the half-known – staccato night whispers
in the kitchen; the long silence. Bone-white elbow tip,
all that’s seen of my father’s arm under my mother’s skirt
in the orchard that sunny day, her toes clenching grass,
the shudder in her voice, nettle-sting shock
ripping between my legs. I move silently
against the scent of their bedroom,
against white light soaked from sheets stretched skin-tight,
the black suitcase beneath the bed; the lining, blood-red as blood,
dotted with dot-size, white stars, carnival in scale,
my mother’s old dresses – blues, greens, pinks, black & white stripes, vital
shades in a magician’s trick.
I covet them,
as though knowing the burn of a man’s hand
on a body that looms in me, one I recognise in slim, belted shapes
I drag from her raw self, a girl who flirted, jived,
her dress flared like the bloom of a foxglove, her core
signalling its want for me in her womb, not knowing
that in giving me life, I will seize everything from her.
/ The Untimely Death of My Mother’s Hens

Nothing is remarkable now
that my father wears a yellow

slubbed silk lampshade on his head.
He says, I’ll never again go west

of the Shannon. He has just buried
our mother there, with her people,

like a parcel returned to the post office
– no longer of this address.

I thought she was on the road to recovery.
She bought a dozen brown hens.

I remember them only this morning.
It is easy to deal with the dead

ones – rigid, puffed bodies. I fork one
then another into the bushes. The living

stagger in the daylight. They coo
like a mother’s lullaby; feathers fanned,

frozen in the act of ruffling. Their beaks
remain open long after they quieten;

eyelids shutter slow as an eclipse. Some
totter towards me. Others stumble away.

The double-looped fringe sways
to my father’s breath, a moustache of sorts.

I believe he can hear me, but I can’t
be certain. I ask, Is it hot under that?

He says, Switch off them lights, and
mind the bill, will’ya
/ Father Tells Me He Loves Me

The day after Father’s death,
I lock myself in the orchard
cave among thirty, blind, white mares.

His final heartbeat jolted an ovum from the ovary
of only one mare, her tail now arched,
vulva oozing. I unwrap the mantilla that binds her
muzzle. From my mouth
she accepts the red apple I offer; our tongues touch
– a communion before our journey.

At the moonlit church door, her oestrus taunts
the confessional. Down the aisle she trots, unbolts
Father’s oak coffin. Statues and stale incense mask
him. Him! – ivory-faced holy man
or beloved world leader.

He confirmed my life once only
through his spurt of seed, his grunt
in my mother’s ear a sweaty sin.

Alphabet-clots bleed from his fontanel.
Blackcurrant-black consonants flow
over his wedding tie, soak the white shirt he bought
the month before. Cherry-red vowels glut his lips.

The mare’s breath ripples the bloody rush,
ushers in the order of tide. Words sculpted like driftwood
wash onto his chest. I see each one in the mirror
of her brown eye. Together we cry, forelock
to forelock.
/ Father Tells Me He Loves Me

The day after Father’s death,
I lock myself in the orchard
cave among thirty, blind, white mares.

His final heartbeat jolted an ovum from the ovary
of only one mare, her tail now arched,
vulva oozing. I unwrap the mantilla that binds her
muzzle. From my mouth
she accepts the red apple I offer; our tongues touch
– a communion before our journey.

At the moonlit church door, her oestrus taunts
the confessional. Down the aisle she trots, unbolts
Father’s oak coffin. Statues and stale incense mask
him. Him! – ivory-faced holy man
or beloved world leader.

He confirmed my life once only
through his spurt of seed, his grunt
in my mother’s ear a sweaty sin.

Alphabet-clots bleed from his fontanel.
Blackcurrant-black consonants flow
over his wedding tie, soak the white shirt he bought
the month before. Cherry-red vowels glut his lips.

The mare’s breath ripples the bloody rush,
ushers in the order of tide. Words sculpted like driftwood
wash onto his chest. I see each one in the mirror
of her brown eye. Together we cry, forelock
to forelock.
/ The Curse

My father slathers the vulva
with lubricant, the fat lips glossy
as a chestnut, while my brother holds the tail
from which clinkers of dried shit dangle,
her ginger flank also matted in shit. She stands
in the cattle crush, head clamped in the bail,
looking like a tourist admiring the view
through the open window of a train, as though
her head has nothing to do with her body
and her body is all about what she carries,
as my father grasps and grapples with the slithery, banana
-yellow hooves spreading the vulva, as only the vulva can
spread, flap to the world girdled in fibres spun to burn;
my brother holding the tail’s butt now, raising it up as my father
nooses the calf’s legs with ropes, first one, then the other,
naked to the waist, glimmer of mushroom-white flesh
in the February light of the barn; my brother, like a
referee in a boxing match, shuffles close to the action
as though he has done this for all the twelve years of his life,
born to it, born to do, to be, the man in his voice the day he curses
me for losing his blue marble, I hope you’ve twins,
four of them, all in one go! My body already a future
to fear, blood that’s not stopped by a cold key; sorrow
and dread that I’ll be a woman. The vulva pulses its signal
for my father to pull; arched back, neck, head, arms
racked, feet rooted to the ground for traction, ropes
wound through bloodless fists, the vulva
like the mouth of a child spewing; remnants
of the water sac drool like dribble, as if she’s drunk,
as though she sings this new life into the world.
The vulva drawn now to its polished unwrinkled purity,
the last fierce fibres suctioning out what longs for life;
the calf’s snout, eyes, ears framed in an umber aureole,
its rude, puce tongue, its tawny body a bag of bones
as it tumbles to the ground and steams; my father breathless,
hands on his hips, my brother his mirror
as they stand over all creation.
/ Lemass

When I hear that name, I see
again the hole in the wall where my father
hammers a nail to hang new curtains. The flexors
of his freckled arm narrow to his wrist, the nail
held between finger & thumb.
I now see that his hunched shoulders
are a farm labourer’s inheritance. His fingers
are also warped, muscle-bound, as though
forged to only milk a cow. He continues
to pound the nail – wet pebble smell
of cement, his smell
now that he is a builders’ labourer.

He says, What’re y’ looking at, useless?
I’ve learned to outstare him – not bravery,
but fear gone full circle. He seems boxed-in,
as though he’d rather be planting cabbage,
or playing rebel airs on the melodeon.
At times, a fragment of joy hovers
just beyond him, a feeling opposite to love
or hate: the hope of finding myself in a story
without him. He holds a nail in his mouth, a horse
with the bit between its teeth.
I see the shallow hole – gouged concrete
like a jagged splash of hollowed-out grey.
Scattered plaster speckles the red lino.
The nail is bent double.
/ A fly death-flays

on the amber spiral of flypaper,
its hiss in tune with my mother’s listless feet

as she paces the bright, tiled kitchen, shaking
the two-pint brown bottle in both hands
in which she makes butter.

I swam inside her once, before which I lay in wait,
no face, she hymen-locked: our purest time.

Everything between us was a dream. I as much of her
parents and theirs; she not yet hurt, or hurtful;
a daughter churning cream in wooden butter churns,

her body’s rhythm in rhythm with her mother’s,
and grandmother’s and hers; melody that instilled ovum-me
with an awareness of when music stops.

She pokes butter blobs through the bottleneck
with a knitting needle; scent of almond, dawn, wild garlic;
her eyes close corpse-solid, Just for the taste.

The fly, wings outstretched; iridescent
in an angle of evening light,
tranquil; poised as though for flight.
/ If

If she’d called the Gardaí, they’d see
my mother and me eyeball each other in the kitchen.
If she’d called the Gardaí, they’d recognize the smell of
blood, her blood; the tang of my first milks – sugars
sucked from her breasts, iron from her umbilical.
If she’d called the Gardaí, they’d notice
the razorblade held aloft by my mother
like a priest honours the raised host.
If she’d called the Gardaí, the female Garda
would view my mother as caught red-handed.
If she’d called the Gardaí, they’d observe
blood on the razorblade, track its teardrop
trickle down the blade’s edge, down
her index fingernail’s shiny, pink surface,
a crescent of red under her thumbnail. See it
ripple over her knuckle wrinkles. If she’d called the Gardaí,
the male Garda would say, What happened here? Black
notebook in one hand, black pen poised in the other.
If she’d called the Gardaí, she’d repeat what she’d said
when she found the blade, Who put this in my shoe?
The razorblade would quiver.
The geraniums would quiver.
The words would quiver
from the black ink onto the white page.
Fingerprints would be dusted for in that house
where touch was threat. Cameras would haul
light into the loveless corners. The bloody
blade would be bagged, tagged. Evidence.
A high-vis medic would bandage my mother’s big toe.
If she’d called the Gardaí, the female Garda
would reassure me, Your Mam will be OK.
The blade would lay boxed on a metal shelf
in a room of shelves of similar boxes.
The case would become a cold case, a case
the authorities forget, until one night, let’s say,
a frosty night in January 40 years later, someone
phones the Garda confidential line. For argument sake, let’s say
it’s a woman. Let’s say, she’s been smoking in the backyard
at 2 a.m. Stars cut the dark with stamps of story long dead.
She hesitates on the line. Her voice breaks, If she’d
loved me, she says. If she’d only loved me.

Breda Spaight

- Ireland -

Poetry

/ Bacon

/ The Suitcase

/ The Untimely Death of My Mother’s Hens

/ Father Tells Me He Loves Me

/ Father Tells Me He Loves Me

/ The Curse

/ Lemass

/ A fly death-flays

/ If