Poem of the Week: “The Elsewhere Empire” by Medbh McGuckian

Medbh McGuckian’s “The Elsewhere Empire,” from her new collection The Thankless Paths to Freedom (2024), explores the emotional and physical spaces that loss often occupies. She writes, “there is no after the war, the rain of an earlier day, / the balmy elsewhere of winglets past the flowers // in their rifles.” When a loved one is lost, a portion of us feels lost within ourselves—or unconsciously placed elsewhere. This poem articulates this experience by weaving together fragments of environments and distant memories.

– Virginia Noone, WFU Press Intern

The Elsewhere Empire

In a glint of red candles and throat pleats
the house feels composed. White chrysanthemum
revolution. The starling’s black bill turns yellow
in the spring, fake bird of paradise.

I had you living beside me, a young saint,
glorious cub of the household. I invented
a sister for you, named Paula, her possible soul,
our eternal possessions, our digital perpetuity.

Sometimes our concern with moonrise,
its insistence on midsummer and midwinter,
is like a detail of a burial of any unsettled souls
in a sea of electrified language, dashes of lime

on the wall itself. The smoke-grey coat
of a laceworks of death—mavrone, for me,
there is no after the war, the rain of an earlier day,
the balmy elsewhere of winglets past the flowers

in their rifles. The diet was so poor, men’s voices
did not break till they were twenty, not really believing
what they knew. And every time I turn on an electric
light I believe that love, The Orchid Hotel, South Flower St.

While she was rooted to her bed along braided
pathways I saw an advertisement that the mountain
was for sale, frost wedging extra virginity
woven around the dark nutmeg seed.

She is buried with herbs of love, ghost fishing.
The sound of one’s footsteps start to fade,
the stairs feel as if they descend further than they do,
or feel like a room in themselves, an afterthought.

– Medbh McGuckian, from The Thankless Paths to Freedom (2024)