cO-WINNER OF THE 2025 GRIERSON VERSE PRIZE
Aoibh Downey is an English literature and History student from the Isle of Man. Their work draws on Irish and Manx folkloric cultures, touching on themes of cultural erasure, memory, loss, queerness and everything in between. Beyond the page, Aoibh is a resident DJ at Edinburgh’s community radio station EHFM, celebrating the temporal, collective spaces we create when engaged in dance.
Anglophone
Black-ink letters swarm the page
In Roman murmurations,
Migrating across deserted lines
Still embossed with yesterday’s musings.
As Gaeilge there are thirty-two words for field,
Each letter cradles customs long-departed
On the last ferry westwards, suitcase spilling
Fadas in excess across the sea
To colonise another land linguistically.
Beneath the peat lies arrowheads of ‘A’
And chunks of G, battered and enclosed:
Suffocated by ‘field’ in its totality.
The elegance of ‘F’ attaching to ‘E’
Can’t smell yesterday’s cow-shit on its foot;
It’s metre doesn’t stumble over rabbit holes
Landing softly, engulfed by green.
My hand’s skeletal ballet
Dances only to the sound of conquest;
It cannot shape the cry of a calf-less cow
Keening into the night.
