Laura Foley: “Sister in the Old Country”
SISTER IN THE OLD COUNTRY
Wicklow Road, County Cavan. Sixteen,
I visit nanny Mrs. D.’s sister, who at seventy-five
still rides a bike, wears a pink flowered dress
I recognize as a hand-me-down from Mom. We sit
in the kitchen, a circle of women on metal chairs,
Christ smiling from the wall despite his bleeding heart.
She says the rosary and we repeat, Blessed is the fruit,
full of grace, thy womb…. Crones’ voices droning,
like ancient druids, echoing in the linoleum-tiled room.
Aromas of puddings, soda bread baking, mouth-watering
odor of onions, eggs, mutton, tomatoes fried in fat.
Faces like ancient stones, pale, hardened, weather-worn.
Outside, the acrid smell of burning peat, damp earth
and salt air—the sacred, encircling sea.
Laura Foley, second place winner of Narrative’s Fifteenth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author most recently of It’s This. Her collection Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review and an Eric Hoffer Award. “Gratitude List” won the Common Good Books Poetry Award; “Nine Ways of Looking at Light” won the Joe Gouveia Poetry Contest. Her work has been included in Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope.