Katherine
Duffy

confession

In charcoal gloom beyond the grille, an ear blooms, grey and ragged,
a lily frayed by bad air and secrets. I state how long it’s been —
that’s how you’re meant to begin, offer up white lies, curse-crumbs,
my perfunctory disobedience. Through mesh and the blur of shadow
I can still see which one he is. Not the worst, though my mother says
he drinks. (An unnatural life, she adds, they should let them marry.)
My child, my child, he mutters, sounding disappointed. Have I been too
sinful or not enough? There’s a sheen on his skin that I need a word for
— impervious, complacent — I didn’t know those back then. I wait
for his rigmarole to end, for him to move the dark air with his hand,
a signal I’m free. Three of this, two of that. I breathe again. And now
I’m wondering when I stepped outside the box for good. Sleek walls
of cherry wood. How long since I closed the carved door on the last
forgiver? Sometimes I even wonder how you’re meant to go on.

Katherine Duffy is an Irish poet, writer, and translator, based in Dublin. Her pamphlet, ‘Talking the Owl Away’, won a Templar Iota Shot award, and was published by Templar Poetry in 2018. Sorrow’s Egg is the most recent of her two full collections published by The Dedalus Press (Ireland). Her website address is www.kateduv.com

Katherine wrote the following about ‘Confession’:

I was raised a Catholic in Ireland, and attended convent school throughout the 1960s and 70s. I was eight when I made my First Confession, a big milestone for Catholic kids. I had to scrabble about for sins to tell, and the whole thing seemed dry and anti-climactic. At the same time, it felt slightly sinister. In my early twenties, I shook the dust of Catholicism off my heels, but now in later life, I find myself reflecting on those deeply-ingrained rituals, even missing them a little. The day that I wondered: when was my last confession, the poem began...