Poem of the Week: A Hymn to All Restless Girls

after Elizabeth Willis

On this anniversary of The Irish State,
better instead to celebrate a restless girl.
A restless girl speaks the language of a birch.
A restless girl can besmirch a priest in a flash.
A restless girl takes a splash of whiskey before noon.
The skin of a restless girl smells of gunfire and wolves.
Often a restless girl will ask if not now, when?
Many restless girls fall asleep in the sun.
One restless girl had to be pinned down by six men.
Another restless girl tore up an image of the pope.
A restless girl may disguise herself as a stone.
Sometimes a pale horse will take a restless girl away in the night.
The underslip of a restless girl should not be washed;
it should be burned.
When leaving a room first check the corpse of a restless girl has not
sprung alive behind your back.
Best always to bury a restless girl in the wettest, darkest earth.
It has been said that a restless girl once returned
to haunt an innocent man.
A whole town can be fouled by one restless girl.
But see how the restless girl shimmers
in the razor-light of a Scots pine.
See how she sweetens the air like hawthorn.
The restless girl belongs to us as fox belongs to moon.
The fact is the restless girl has been, for us, a constitution.
On public occasions we wear a necklace
from which the ornament of her cut tongue hangs.
If the last restless girl ends up drowned,
or turned to ash, or trapped inside
a horse-haired wall, what then?
What then?

Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s collections include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press,2021). She is a recipient of the Irish Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award. She was a 2022-2023 Decade of Centenaries artist in residence at Donegal County Archives. Today’s poem is from Ghostgirl, a sequence written during her residency