Plagiarism
trekking through fields
around mountains
in leitrim. feeling your feet
as they slip, spinning silt
like a spoon-fueled
whirlpool, sinking
through milk-
soured coffee.
footsteps mark earth:
make fossils to wash
down with rainwater –
and sometimes
these things
are preserved.
like that shoreline,
shoelace ragged,
down south on valentia
island; the tetrapod
trackways. shallow marks
and tailprints
which melt
on the rocks. once
we went down there;
me and jack
and our friend, aodhain,
the geologist,
so he could scratch
some samples out
to test. illegal,
of course,
but it’s different
when it’s science – perhaps
knowing something
will teach him
something new.
my tracks take space
beneath the shadows
of live forests. and over
of dead ones – trees beaten down
in clay crush,
broken mud. without before,
what to leave footprints in? and without it, where
to grow grass? plagiarism
just inspiration
which springs without follow-through.
DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has been nominated fourteen times for BOTN, eleven for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022)