Emma McKervey

Needful Things

The epidermis of whale is stripped from the carcass
like the skin of an orange, round and round in long pieces.
The hunting down of those creatures with antler harpoon
seems improbable by Mesolithic men who had no knowledge
of orange peel to contextualise their actions.
In freezing winds, beneath the shore line pines,
blankets of blubber predicated the warmth of burning oil and flesh.
The people worked the dead thing as though their lives depended on it.
Their lives depended on it. They looked from sharpened bone blade
to fallen branches scattered about, and saw them bound with tendon,
matlocks for the butchering, slippery with the fat and blood of the work.
It is through flesh and blood that the necessary things become known;
the making of heat, of light, of food,
the hafting of the needed with the needful thing.

Emma McKervey lives on the Ards Peninsula in Northern Ireland. Her work has been widely published across the UK and Ireland. Emma's debut collection was published by Doire Press, and her second, written with the support of ACNI, will be published by Turas Press in March 2024. She is currently working towards a MRes in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queens University, Belfast. 

Emma wrote the following about ‘Needful Things’:

I believe what is sacred often arises out of what is necessary, something that was emphasised to me by a cousin on the Outer Hebrides a few years ago when she was explaining how the family Croft operated on a Sunday, doing only work which was "Needful or merciful".  The use in the poem of abstracting words such as 'contextualise' is to add a slightly arch tone to reflect a modern sensibility which has a horror of such bloody, Needful work, and is as removed and disconnected from a numinous necessity as the Mesolithic of the North to peeling an orange.