Poem of the Week: “The mornings you turn into a grub” by Ailbhe Darcy

Ailbhe Darcy’s “The mornings you turn into a grub” is a humorous meditation into the feelings of aging with a Kafkaesque premise. Darcy puts into words the experience of grossness and inadequacy that come with a changing body, whether they are justified or not.

The mornings you turn into a grub

it begins with the heart.
You lie listening to the thunder
of bin men hoisting garbage larvae
from outside every house. Your housemate
showers, bangs things, jangles keys, moves
_____________________away at a trot.

You feel your blood thickening,
slurring. You think of Henry Sugar,
able to self-diagnose. You warn the ceiling,
‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’ Your chest
seems to swell
or contract. You wonder
if you have woken as a fat, middle-aged man,
instead of beside one.

You feel all sclerotic. No, you feel soft.
You feel like a scrambled egg omelette,
having once read the recipe
in a Sunday supplement:
Edward de Bono’s Jolly Good Eggs.
‘Most omelette fillings,’ wrote Ed,
‘are boring and detract from the eggs.’

For this recipe you make the omelette as usual,
but before you fold it in two,
you fill up its belly with scrambled eggs.
The result is an omelette with an omelette taste
but a soft and runny interior. The taste
is pure egg all the way through. You are pure egg,
all the way through,
the mornings you turn into a grub.

–Ailbhe Darcy, from The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry,
Vol. IV (2017)