Laurence wins poetry award
Dundalk based writer Laurence McKeown has won first prize in a poetry competition hosted by the National Print Museum in association with Creative Ireland. Entries had to be within a maximum of 12 lines. Irish poet, Stephen James Smith judged the competition entries.
Laurence says he is ‘delighted’ to have won the competition with his poem which was based on a conversation he had with a close friend whose sister, a nurse, had just been assigned to a ward to treat Covid-19 patients. One of her duties was to write a card to the family of those who had died while she was caring for them, inspiring him to write the following: I Couldn’t Tell Her ‘After he died I wrote to his wife about his final hours. Those hours he’d spent alone with me.
I couldn’t tell her it was her he loved
her that he wanted so much to return to to hold, kiss, make love with. I just couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her because he couldn’t speak. A stranger to me
I just happened to witness his death.
Staff nurse Williams, Covid-19 Ward, 13.04.2020.’
Laurence says ‘We all owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to nurses and all frontline workers who have day after day continued with their work regardless of the very real, and often fatal, dangers to their own lives and to that of their partners, children, and loved ones. I know that people may feel that they are expressing some solidarity to nurses by standing at their front doors and clapping but really we need to be on bended knee if not totally prostrate on the ground in admiration of what they have done and continue to do. As always, it is the ‘ordinary’, decent, selfless, working-class people who have risen to the moment. I can only hope that the sacrifice they have made, and continue to make on a daily basis, is forever etched in our memories once these dark days have gone. I measc laochra na h-Éireann go mbeidh siad le cuimhniú.’
Laurence’s first book of peotry ‘ Threads’ received favourable reveiws when it was published by Salmon Press in 2018.