Reverb

i)

The grandson I am knows
all about bleeding pig in the yard,
filching apples, auctioning
all but the rushy acres
of an inherited farm, being robbed,
conjuring brown trout
through bullrushes with the unlikeliest lure:
cheddar, chocolate.

How constellations marshal above fields humming with frost,
Orion, the Pleiades. The night mountains.
How they swallow the shadows.
Shoebox burials by moonlight in the cillín.

A great grandfather was from Aghnameadle, Tipperary.
A great grandmother from Knocknagoshel, Kerry.
A grandmother, their daughter, herself from Charleville, Cork,
arrived, via teashop shifts and dances in London,
in Aherlow, Tipp again, my navvy grandfather’s place,
then my mother’s. Then mine.


ii)

I’ve heard that a horse’s skull
strategically placed under floorboards
acted as an amplifier,
made ceilidhs more resonant
when fiddles sped, dancers
stamped rhythm. Add bottlecaps,
add coins, it became a tambourine.
How grey-haired grandchildren
found them, pulling up floorboards,
and held the skull of a horse as if
it was just the skull of a horse.

–Dean Browne

Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Recent poems have appeared in London Magazine and New York Review of Books. His first collection After Party will be published by Picador this year.