E. M. Morrow is a Northern Irish poet, raised in a flashpoint area of working-class Belfast in the aftermath of the Troubles. Her poetry springs from the seeds of intergenerational trauma, memory evoked through symbolism and the surrealism of the unconscious. She has a BSc and MSc in Psychology, and currently works as a trauma therapist.
THE GLASSBLOWER
The North star fades, bone-lit.
Oblivious to my marble eye’s
blinking searchlight.
A one-eyed storm blows the Irish sea
toward me, dream-life catching sea-green
shimmers, drowning.
Distance has become an animal:
its hind legs tremble, baiting
to blow my lights out.
The waves sniff out my wet hair,
dazed and bled by waking dreams
of shedding selkie skins turned amber-dry.
Not so, my black-stemmed edge
still drinks the riverbed
in the funereal glow of dawn.
As daughter of the hot chamber,
poured into the blue beauty of the river,
I begin to cool and sharpen.
BLOODROOT
Tonight, the magma glows - I know the look
of Belfast darkness, velvet-gloved and gold.
The blood-shot eye of fortune burns the sky,
exhaling hot alarm to raise the dead.
The Molotov rush: a heavy red perfume
of drumming hearts, before they break the skin.
Then bleeding starts, from ear to shattered knee,
as spider lilies flush in graveside blooms.