Born in Dublin in 1967, Sara Berkeley graduated from Trinity College in 1989, after which she wandered somewhat aimlessly round the globe for a while pretending she had a plan. She finally settled in a rural valley just northwest of San Francisco, where she lives with her husband and young daughter.
Her poetry collections are Penn (Dublin, Raven Arts Press/Canada, Thistledown Press, 1986); Home Movie Nights (Raven Arts Press/Thistledown Press, 1989); Facts About Water, New and Selected Poems (Dublin, New Island Books/Canada, Thistledown Press/Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, Bloodaxe Books, 1994); and Strawberry Thief (Oldcastle, Co Meath, The Gallery Press, 2005).
Little River
When harm is done
your sorrow
creaks along like an ice-floe
and then it is no man’s remorse
but a hunted animal
tangling in briars and tearing free
on and wantonly on from the small wrong—
but I can be a river where the scent will drown.
I am the river where you come to fish,
lean and fleet where the line drops lazily in,
trembling with the slight fish just below my skin
and where the threaded fly brushes winnowing riverweed
my warm current carries the light twig
and the small wrong
downstream, and above me on the wooden bridge
you swill water in the pail,
ready for all I have to give.
Less than a Hundred Hours
I have put on a warm skin,
I have come in
from the garden, where a pallor is caught
on every thorn.
before the light goes.
The secret alters with the hours,
sleep slows the colours,
but in the morning, waking from some warm place
it flowers timidly against the covers,
pale on the pillow where six hours of sleep
damp down easily to a drawing of breath.
You know it’s you I see at evening
when the light goes.
It is less than a hundred hours,
and the secret fits so close I have almost grown to it,
something I have touched a lot,
I know its shape by every light,
its colours deepen as the day arches
towards noon,
dragging its heavy form
by night it has become
hot and damp in the palm,
and now it is less than a hundred hours
until you come.
You know it is you I see at evening
before the light goes.
