Jeff Coulter
Shattered Sonnet to a Lost Love I
if you are the last word that god will mouth
before I turn to the goat paths of exile
be an oath in a forbidden language my love
tart like the hard green plums of early spring.
be the tired hands of a beautiful village girl
weaving her few paltry curses into the water
she carries to her father’s ever greedy table
alive to the thirst of her unborn childrens’ needs.
be a knife scraping the lungs of calfs clean
leaving not a drop of blood to dry
on summer’s hard unforgiving plain.
be the rain of my slack stringed guitar
as it stumbles over far flung thresholds
to sit with old women who once knew nothing of
you
N. P. Ó Dochartaigh grew up in Kildare in the midlands of Ireland, he has resided in Istanbul since 1995. Under a slightly different form of his name he has translated a great deal of Turkish poetry and was editor of Turkish Poetry Today in 2017. His translation work has appeared in Poetry International, Berlin Quarterly, The Honest Ulsterman, Seattle Star, Enchanting Verses, The Dreaming Machine and Poetry Wales. He is currently working on a tricky prose translation from the Turkish. He has accumulated a reasonable backlog of original work for which is now seeking homes.
Jeff Coulter is a writer, artist, and speaker focused social justice and issues of power, privilege, and difference. During the pandemic in 2020 he began sorting through old photographs and noticed some that motivated him to begin photography classes. This selection in Feral represents his first published photo.