Editorial

Like his father before him, my dad ran a pub and restaurant at the crossroads of a small Irish village a short walk from St. Brigid’s church. As a child, I’d eavesdrop on conversations—the everyday goings on of the village’s inhabitants. Dad also served as the local undertaker. We’d sometimes joke, given the proximity of the pub to the church (scene of baptisms and weddings as well as funerals), that he offered a cradle-to-grave service. He kept coffins in the loft above the pub’s storeroom. I thought it was quite normal to have the paraphernalia of burial near to hand. It felt natural that death should be so close to daily life.

Many of the poems we have selected for Issue Five of The Marrow concern themselves with the everyday business of living and dying. Often, life and death occupy the same page. Take Sumayya Arshed’s ‘A Tombstone Near My Home’, where “the marble hums with memory” and the eponymous stone “has listened to wedding songs, / to whispered goodbyes, / to diseases that crept in like guests / and refused to leave”. Or Doug Rampeck’s ‘Four Omens in Three Days’, which begins with the threat of death: “father … lying again on the kitchen floor” and ends with mother “standing at the stove, / the spatula perched in her hand like a baton”, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Or the tense impact of ‘Look at the Deer’ by Robert McDonald, where a near-miss brings on “a quick / and passing knowledge of how the forces / of the world might / snap a row of bones”.

Other poems examine specific incidents of a life, from beginning to end. In ‘The witch is with child’, Christina Hennemann offers a portrait of a strange birth that makes us shiver as “the baby / pushes      with devil horns”. In ‘Rotor’, Ann Shenfield’s encounter with the void of controlled near-death leaves us dizzy: “we protected ourselves by standing up / against the wall in the vortex / watching the floor fall from our feet”. Rowan Tate’s ‘Appetite’ considers the return of all life to the earth—our mulchy, fungal destiny (“God is nearby, mouth open, waiting”).

There are meditations on the temporal nature of existence—the march of time towards our fate. ‘Cormorant’ by Charlie Williams reminds us that the nature of life is to pass by: “many clocks drop down, / each keeping their own tally / on your days”. Change and decline are acknowledged in Mary Mulholland’s ‘I call my mother by her childhood nickname’, whose ‘Dodo’ is left only with “her store of stories”, and Bill Garvey’s ‘Luke’s Island, Nova Scotia’, where the island develops with time and nature and “the view they bought is not / as perfect as before”.

What is one to do with the burden of all this being? Perhaps, like Ashish Kumar Singh, ‘One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy’. Or one absents oneself entirely, like Petunia in Adam Tavel’s ‘Sick Note’. Perhaps poetry might offer some solace, some answer—some better kind of question, at least. We hope that the poems gathered in this issue might brighten and enrich the corners of the days in which you encounter them, even those darkest days when death seems nearest.

Our editors were shocked and saddened to learn of the recent passing of Charmaine Papertalk Green. Renowned poet, visual artist, researcher and cultural leader, Charmaine employed her gifted voice in the pursuit of truth and justice for First Nations communities. Charmaine’s poem ‘I saw lines running down my face’ appeared in the inaugural issue of The Marrow. Her family, friends and community are in our thoughts.

Daragh Byrne, co-editor

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Sick Note