How do we engage with the sacred when religious language has been used to control, coerce, and erase alternate spiritualities, when history is littered with traumas enacted by institutionalized religion? Irish poet and host of On Being’s acclaimed podcast Poetry Unbound, Pádraig Ó Tuama is familiar with these kinds of traumas. Born in Cork, Ireland, in 1975, while north of the border the sectarian conflict of the Troubles raged, he grew up gay in the Catholic church. From 2014–2019, Ó Tuama worked as the leader of Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization, Corrymeela, pursuing conflict resolution amid the enduring effects of the Troubles. To Ó Tuama, salvific forces cannot be bound or defined by fixed languages of belief—instead, healing is found in embodied encounter, collective questioning, the poetics of friendship, and storytelling.
In his fourth and newest collection of poetry, Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), Ó Tuama trades dogma for the knowing that comes through experience and touch, reckoning with religious trauma, queer desire, rage, and grief. God becomes a “favorite emptiness,” “believe” becomes “a poor verb.” The body is sacramental in these poems, which are simultaneously vulnerable and erotic, full-throated hymns of joy and sadness alike. In our conversation, Ó Tuama opens up about the effects of sectarianism and colonialism on spirituality and languages of belief; the transcendence of eroticism; bereavements during COVID; poetry as resurrection; and the poem’s relationship to the body.
Kate Millar (KM): What was the inciting moment for Kitchen Hymns?
Pádraig Ó Tuama (PÓT): There was a great Irish musician, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, whose concert I attended in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. He was a composer of traditional Irish music, but he mixed it with baroque, which isn’t unusual. Irish music from the 1700s is very baroque because the British penal laws meant that a lot of Irish aristocracy went to Austria and Prussia, so there was always a rich exchange between traditional Irish music in the 1700s and baroque music. Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin really amplified that connection, adding in some jazz. Hiberno jazz, he called the whole thing.
He had the entire Irish Chamber Orchestra behind him. He was on the piano. He also had traditional fiddle players from County Donegal and traditional gaeilgeoirs singing across the multiple dialects of Irish on stage too. In the write-up for the performance, he spoke about how it was a conversation between formalized music, improvisation, and old kitchen hymns that you find in rural places like Donegal. And I was like, “What are these kitchen hymns?” So, I barely paid any attention to what was happening on the stage, beautiful as it was, because I was electrified by this term kitchen hymns and then began a pursuit from that.
KM: What was your discovery in the research of kitchen hymns?
PÓT: It’s a loose term for hymnodies that were never allowed to be sung in a chapel, because they weren’t in Latin. They were songs, holy songs, sung in the kitchen, sung at home, probably composed by women, though nobody knows who they’re composed by. The point of view of many of these old hymns is that of a woman who’s holding a son of hers, and it’s hard to know from stanza to stanza, and sometimes line to line, whether that son is a baby or a corpse. There’s an extraordinary malleability to time and what’s happening, the mix of both joy and grief. In that way, they’ve got a particular Marian Catholic approach, but they’re also much more expansive in the sense of all the circumstances of sorrow that a parent goes through. And what is it like to, what Shakespeare called, “give sorrow words.”
Nóirín Ní Riain is a great Irish scholar of music and theology. I went to meet her and talk to her about the kitchen hymns—because nobody has written about them. She was able to say, “Well, if you look through this particular collection of ethnomusicology, a little book called Dánta Dé,”—which means Poems of God, published in 1928 by Úna Ní Ógain—“if you read through this, and then look at the footnotes in the back, and you see the reference in the footnotes to where the melody and the lyric came from the same valley, then, you’re probably reading the lyric of a traditional kitchen hymn.” So that was a very helpful piece of codification to understand. I speak Irish, and so it was great to be able to use that.
Though nothing in my book is a direct translation, or even a direct response to these kitchen hymns, in some ways it’s taking the spirit of that and thinking, What do I say in my kitchen? What happens there, and what happens in places that wouldn’t be allowed in a chapel? What’s a poetic for that? What’s a language for that? What’s a risk for that? That’s at the heart of the book.
KM: I was drawn to your idea of the removal of the “burden of belief” that you introduce at the end of the collection’s first part. It feels like the inciting incident for the “Do You Believe in God?” sequence of poems: fifteen poems with the same title, all responding to that question with a story rather than any kind of theological creed. Could you talk a bit more about the “burden of belief”?
PÓT: It’s a critique the whole way throughout the book, a critique of the verb believe. I like that burden and verb rhyme. Early on there is a line where the grasses say, “Believe is a poor verb,” and then toward the end, just before the “Do you believe in God?” sequence, the speaker of the poem says, “The burden / of belief isn’t on me anymore.” I wanted to separate the idea and question of God from the verb believe because I think believe places extraordinary weight—intellectual weight, spiritual weight, conceptual weight and fact-based weight—on any individual who’s trying to contain that. I began to look for other verbs when it comes to my doubt and my rage and my yearning and my suspicion and my sadness, all gathered around the question of God—my politics of the question of God. And believe seemed far too propositional and far too conclusive. I wanted to respond to the sometimes intangible, vague, misty, or ideologically led idea of belief with stories of erotica, stories of the body, stories of tangibility, stories of risk, experimentation, stories of politics, stories of time. So that a response to the question “Do you believe in God?” is a story.
KM: It was a clever device to have so many poems with the same title. The poem becomes cheeky, answering the question and refusing the whole notion of the question at the same time, or the possibility of a singular answer. You interrogate the language of belief: “Do you believe in Mass? a missionary asked. / The question seemed like asking me if I believed in toast, or tea, / or beatings. Plain facts. Are you asking if I like it? I asked. / He doesn’t understand, she said, looking straight through me.” That was really powerful to read. It captured how when there’s fixed language around belief, it renders people invisible.
PÓT: It renders people invisible, but it also renders people as objects. The setup for that particular poem is Northern Protestant missionaries (so-called missionaries) coming across the border to convert Catholics. You know, asking the priest if he believes in God—how fucking arrogant, you know? And the imagination that a) they’re in a different country, because of the certain British imagination that the two jurisdictions of Ireland are foreign to each other; and b) the idea that they had something to say, which was about a demand.
Here’s the strange thing: If that group of young people ran a few seminars in our village in Cork, saying, “Listen to some Northerners talk about their experience of faith, living through the Troubles,” half the village would have turned out—because they would have been telling the truth. Instead, they were pursuing the village, trying to imply to them that they should all become Christian—as if they weren’t. There’s an intellectual failure in that kind of imagination of who “the other” is, and “the other” in that situation was the Catholic Southerner.
And we were “the natives,” you know. I was complimented for the comprehensibility of my accent—looking back, it was so pejorative. I wanted to look at that. The speaker in that poem is very close to a teenage me. There was a circumstance where somebody asked me, “Do you believe in mass?” And I was like, “I don’t know what you mean.” Ultimately what they meant was, do I believe what they believe. In that situation, the question was a trap. It was a shibboleth. It was a way to indicate sectarian belonging, and there was zero self-consciousness, it seemed to me, in using language for a trap. People with cross-border experiences in Ireland will understand the religious dynamics of sectarianism there but people outside of that will also understand when somebody’s asking a question but it’s not their real question. The real question was something like, do you want to be one of us? Or, do you want to neglect your cultural and religious and political background? Do you want to become something else through the tantalizing offer—as well as the unstated threat—of changing your belief system? In some ways the poem is an intellectual pushing back on the commodification of belief as some kind of sectarian threat under the guise of an invitation.
KM: Do you feel like the burdens of belief, and the languages of belief, are very culturally determined?
PÓT: Well, it depends what it is, I suppose. I’m not a person of belief, even though I love the question of God. It depends what it is you want to do with your belief. Plenty of people believe in God, and they use that as the beginning point for curiosity about the world. Whereas other people have a belief in a religious point of view, and they use that to convince and to recruit and to market. Often by denigrating other systems of moral thinking and action, and seeking to alienate people from their cultural background. That’s the history of missionaries, isn’t it? To go elsewhere, believing that you have an answer to a question that you refuse to imagine people are already asking. Questions about origin, source, purpose, meaning, love, community, right action. People everywhere ask those questions. But the missionary imagination is that you’re going to a place where people aren’t.
KM: The collection seems to land at a different type of belief, like in the “Rite of Baptism”: “Here is what we cannot guarantee you: / guarantees, or history’s purity.” Do you think that belief is a word that could be salvaged if redefined?
PÓT: Yeah. Well, my guess is that there’s already a hundred different ways of thinking about belief. I’m interrogating and pushing and rejecting certain approaches to that verb that have been particularly manipulative, and particularly ideological or imperial. That is not fair to everybody who uses that verb. Though the character who’s speaking in “Rite of Baptism,” I don’t think they’re very likable. Maybe I agree with much of what they say but they have no power. At no stage, apart from this linguistic intervention, are they saying, “I’ll help.” They’re basically saying, “You’re alone. You have to learn to help yourself.” And that is something I wanted to put into the book very definitely. In many ways, Kitchen Hymns is an exploration of the lyric address, the word you. How is it that the word you occurs? “Do you believe in God?” and then what’s evoked from that. The you that occurs in the imperatives of “Rite of Baptism”—and the way that it ends, “you must believe / some of this”—is very important to me, that even that speaking voice knows that only some of what they say must be believed.
I am very interested in what happens in the you, between the you of the speaker, parts where I refer to myself as you, where characters are in conversation, where the voice on the page is speaking to the readership. That voice is multivalent as well as changing as well as not always believable.
I wanted to separate the idea and question of God from the verb believe because I think believe places extraordinary weight on any individual who’s trying to contain that.
KM: I love this notion of a capacious you. I am interested in the you of “Eat this Bread”: “The way you hold your mouth open / and you hop after your mother … The way you ask and ask and ask / as if you know you’ll die if you don’t. … You don’t know / what satisfaction is. / The way you tantrum your wings.” And then it ends with, “I can’t stand you.” I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this address specifically.
PÓT: What’s really coming under scrutiny in that poem is the speaker. The bird’s just a bird, a baby bird. What else is it supposed to do? Of course it tantrums its wings. The “cheep, cheep, cheep,” the sound of it—why is it that vulnerability in something so tiny draws out such rage and rejection from a speaker? I was curious to put that in, and to have the you—the hateful you—speaking. But the hateful you is very close to me, you know. I saw a small siskin; they look a little bit like a greenfinch. It was just a golf ball of early fluff feathers, bouncing around after its mother. The mother was feeding it seeds. I had seeds out in the back patio. There was an unadulterated demonstration of need in this chick, and it evoked a feeling of rage in me, a feeling of envy, presumably. I was thinking, “My God, what?” I love birds, but why this experience? That’s one of the things that the poem is trying to explore. How cruel we can be under the guise of observation. And how, in a certain sense, the speaker is in a crisis, needing to examine what it is that’s being evoked in them in the face of something very vulnerable.
KM: It’s Carl Jung’s idea of the “shadow self.” The bird is the speaker’s shadow self, what the speaker can’t stand in themselves, their own need.
PÓT: Of course. Need is another way of saying prayer. Another way of saying desire. Prière, from French, means ask. In order to ask, there has to be some experience of need. So, this experience of rage in the face of something that is so in touch with its need is a theological exploration in the absolute tangibility of a) the circumstance in front of the speaker and b) the circumstances within the speaker.
KM: Would you say that this address transmutes into some kind of prayer itself, so that anger is a prayer?
PÓT: Yes. It’s a prayer, a very difficult one, to contain. Again, the kind of prayer that occurs outside of a chapel.
KM: I am really drawn to what you’ve said about desire and need being tied to prayer. It makes me think of another one of your “Do You Believe in God?” poems. The one that begins,
“It’ll hurt he said I said I know.”
Why did you choose that form?
PÓT: That poem is scattered across the page in little fragments. You can follow it along by reading it directly across the page. But there’s caesura everywhere, elements of breaking or elements of expansion. You could look at it in either way. The speaker is narrating a powerful, overwhelming, early erotic experience. A sought erotic experience. And, in fact, the first lines, “It’ll hurt he said,” are from a man saying to a younger man, “Are you sure?” You know, checking consent. And the ecstatic, almost mystic experience that the speaking character is brought into, where concepts of manliness, concepts of the body, concepts of self, are amplified. Where there is an amplified rage and eros, pleasure and voice and rhythm that occurs in the space between these two characters. I suppose one of the ironies of the poem that’s exploding on the page is that it’s actually a poem about penetration.
I don’t have a formal technique for what I was exploring. It just felt like an apt way to demonstrate the irony of what’s happening in erotic lovemaking where it is, on the one hand, people seeking to come as close as possible, but, on the other hand, you go very far away. You transcend as well as descend.
KM: The paradox of intimacy, which brings back the idea of you as well. When there’s a poetic address, sometimes you is a distancing word, sometimes it is very intimate, sometimes one is speaking to oneself.
This poem made me think of Frank Bidart’s poetry, such as “Music like Dirt”: “I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary / bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.” Did you situate yourself within a poetic lineage in this collection?
PÓT: The Irish poet Thomas MacDonagh credits W. B. Yeats with having identified a particular approach he called “the Irish mode,” which was based on him studying Irish language poetry and listening to the certain arhythmical patterns of rhyme that occur in Irish language poetry which are usually assonance based. They manifest themselves in building up a certain precaution, then modifying without being part of a formal system of modification of rhyme. I know that my poetry is enormously indebted to the Irish language poetry that we were studying in school as well as the rhythms of Yeats’s work in English and the people who were influenced by Yeats. He was a massive figure, politically and poetically. He’s a complicated character, too, but I have been hugely influenced by him. I reread all of Yeats’s work at the beginning of this project.
I wanted some of the rhythms of speech in the book, so the word said is one of the most frequently used words. He said, she said, I said, all of these. I wanted to keep them in because they are the patterns of everyday speech, and I suppose some contemporary poetics. Marie Howe is a big influence in paying attention to the elements of everyday speech as formal poetics.
But I’d say every poem in my collection has a pattern of rhyme—not a mathematical pattern of rhyme, but what I would hope is a pattern of rhyme that you might hear in rainfall, or in a stream, or in a bird, or in a heartbeat, or in the things we say to ourselves. That these are natural, sometimes disturbing, patterns of rhyme that I wanted to manifest in all of these.
KM: The pattern of rhyme applies to the leitmotifs recurring throughout the book, as well as your series poems. In the “Hell Psalms” series, why did you choose to use prose blocks, white ink on black pages?
PÓT: I must have written a hundred Hell Psalms. At the end of 2020 I lost eight years of data on an upgrade of the operating system on my computer. I back up meticulously on the cloud, but the cloud also fails. One very close friend and two acquaintances had died that year, too, and it just felt like at the end of 2020, during COVID, it just felt like the last straw. I hated myself that it was the loss of data that catapulted me into real despair, but I couldn’t bear to look at the screen. I could not bear to look at the screen, because I had eight years where, for every book of poetry that I’d read, I’d copied out the poems that I liked, and then coded them according to being able to do a quick search for stuff. I had volumes and volumes and volumes of writing there that I was convinced were all backed up well—and then they were all gone. So I was just lost, and I found myself needing to write, so I’d close my eyes and type these Hell Psalms onto the screen. I found myself in the persona of Jesus of Nazareth, in an underworld—not any theological imagination of Jesus, but a mask. A truth-telling mask—maybe a part of me, but maybe a part of my readings of these texts, too. I’d been reading lots of Irish mythology, and Gilgamesh as well, thinking through ideas of hell and the underworld that you see in Irish mythology, Greek mythology, Gilgamesh, anything at all that I could get my hands on. I wondered what would Jesus say? What would his speaking voice be?
The prose poems focused down towards the bottom of the page, they are trying to physically depict something that’s arising from under the earth. That character is in despair towards the beginning, but not towards the end. It’s a certain journey towards some kind of acceptance and resolution all occurring in these Hell Psalms. The relief pages are just a way of arresting attention, that this is a different register, and these are a sequence, without having to announce that they’re a sequence on the page. A sequence within a sequence, if you like. And they’re also an experience of solitude, a person in conversation with himself, a person addressing a you who never speaks back. They’re a reflection of interiority. So, on the one hand, it’s in the underworld; but on the other hand, it’s inside a body, it’s inside a brain. And just because there’s no light occurs in those places, it doesn’t mean that there’s no enlightenment.
KM: It feels as if the journey of that speaker is realizing the emptiness of you, the container for all desire, the idea of God. Though, concurrently in the collection—as well as experiencing a divorce from abstraction, the distant you, the absent God—there is a narrative of touch and tangibility in the relationship between Persephone and Jesus in the fourth poetic sequence, “In a Garden by a Gate,” where they meet at the gate to hell. Could you speak about these two journeys?
PÓT: The character speaking in the Hell Psalms is, of course, moving away from previous ideas of God, and is beginning to move into some kind of experience of speaking to a favorite emptiness. There is an epigraph in the book from Paul Celan, “Blessed art thou, No One.” I love that line from his poem “Psalm” because it speaks of how, even though one might believe there’s nothing, one might have a need to speak. The source of prayer, or yearning, or praise, or lament, or rage, needs to find an expression. Isn’t that what poetry is?
So this is an overlap between one of the functions of prayer and one of the functions of poetry: to imagine that there’s an experience of listening at the end of it. Even if this character is unsure, or reframing, or in doubt, or decided that there is no such thing listening, there is nonetheless the yearning to be listened to, and the need to create on the page that which you may not believe exists.
This is what that character is trying to do, and is aided along by touch, as you say. There is an erotic component to the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Persephone. In fact, I shouldn’t even call him Jesus of Nazareth, he’s more like Hell Jesus because he has been fundamentally changed. He’s not from anywhere now, and they each know that they’re gods. He, for the first time, it seems, or certainly the way I’ve constructed it, has met an equal. He’s saying, “Oh, you know my father’s God,” and she’s like, “Mine, too! He’s a bastard.” He’s been in hell, and she’s like, “I’ve been there more times than I can count, a hundred hundred winters.”
There are ways that he is experiencing touch not only physically, but also intellectually, that is reciprocal between him and Persephone. There’s deep respect, albeit deep trauma and wariness between them. But he’s also experiencing what it’s like to touch his own thoughts. To touch his own imagination. I wanted the masturbation poem in there for the purposes of celebrating self-touch. But some of that, too, is also about demonstrating Persephone’s capacity to be interior, and for that to be a place of creativity rather than isolation and rage. And the Hell Jesus character hasn’t learned that yet. He’s shocked and embarrassed by it but clearly compelled also.
KM: That makes me think of the moment where Persephone asks him, “What keeps you returning?” And he says, “I need to feel.” That moment felt like a microcosm of what’s happening in the whole collection. That garden is a place where the Jesus character is being given permission to feel all kinds of things that he hadn’t had permission to feel. The book itself is a garden where the poems can interrogate feelings that have been suppressed or avoided for whatever reason. One of which is rage.
PÓT: Yeah, there’s plenty of rage in the poems. These characters are both, according to the literature, victims of sexual violation. I was interested in what it’s like to have a conversation about that. What it’s like to manifest long time in the conversation between both of them. And what’s it like for these characters to have wisdom to share, particularly Persephone to Jesus in terms of what it’s like to live with rage. “You’ll tell it one way / to yourself today, then you’ll find the story needs to change … then spring [will come]. / Then summer, autumn, winter. Spring again.” Persephone is used to having to deal with this story, and Hell Jesus is learning something that he doesn’t have the coordinates for.
On a literary level I was curious about what it would be like to pose a Jesus character who has things to learn, who is meeting an equal, because in so much of the literature about him, he is so burdened by knowledge and preemptive knowledge and clarity and certitude that I wanted to take all those away. Playfully theological as the collection is, one of the theological things that I do think is important is that many human beings live without certitude and live in the context of shock. I wanted to look at what an incarnation would look and sound like if it took the body seriously, the erotic seriously, the conversation and questions and challenge seriously, and takes temporality seriously.
I feel like I missed the last part of your previous question by going into that little tangent—there was something else you asked.
KM: It was just about rage.
PÓT: Well, these are experiences of rage and denial, like Persephone asks Hell Jesus once, “Who did this to you?” because she can see what’s happened on his back, and she sees that he stands warily, the muscles of his ass and thighs a little tight.
I’ve worked in conflict resolution for many years, and you can always tell who in a room has been incarcerated for political reasons. People who will always want to have an eye on the door. At Corrymeela, where I used to work, most of the rooms where we did facilitation had multiple doors and lots of windows deliberately designed because we were working often with populations of people for whom enclosure was not comfortable. Where enclosure felt like incarceration, so there was always a vista out and multiple ways out.
Persephone has held back from asking Jesus what happened because she can see that he, even though they’re in a garden, is still trying to escape through some kind of door, even if that door is a door back to Hades. And then when she is saying, “Come on, you have to tell me,” and you encounter this rage of absolute resistance in him. “Can’t,” he says. “Don’t want to, either,” distinguishing the difference between capacity and desire. That is a wall of rage, a wall of refusal in him. Later on, in the middle of the night, he wakes her up, and he destroys the whole world and the heavens, in order to show through a kind of imagined cosmic, correlative projection of what rage can do in you. And Persephone goes, “Watch!” And she does the same thing. They experience something like catharsis in their meeting of rage, and that is at no point sat down and facilitated through conversation. Rage and trauma are experiences of the body, and they are resolved through creative experiences of the body rather than cognitive experiences of explaining it all.
The source of prayer, or yearning, or praise, or lament, or rage, needs to find an expression. Isn’t that what poetry is?
KM: So, what is the relationship of the poem to the body?
PÓT: Poetry is a physical event. Way before there was any guarantee of having the vellum to write things on, or people having the capacity to read, poems were recited. Which is to say, that they’re held within a body, communicated from a body, and experienced in the body. Like we’re talking now, my tongue, my lungs, language is an inherently physical thing—so is spirituality, which seems so vague and misty, but it comes from the word spirare, meaning “to breathe,” which is again about the meat of the lungs. So, therefore, I think of poetry as primarily a physical experience. We even talk about the body of the poem. We talk about the stanza of a poem from the Italian word for “room.” Partly what I love about the shape of a poem on a page, and also the shape of a recited poem, is the enjambment, the line breaks, the empty space, the stanza break—but also the necessity for breath, which is a sonic demonstration of enjambment. That is a communication of all of the “nothing” that can’t be contained within the “something” that’s being recited in the poem. And that, too, is a physical thing that goes down to our atomic level. One of the speakers of my poems talks about the “hum at the heart of an atom.” An atom is so filled with nothing that it seems surprising that it makes something at all. All of those are physical manifestations for me, for all poetry. I think it’s impossible to separate poetry from the body.
KM: That’s a paradigm shift for me. I’ve been stuck in this false dichotomy, thinking, “Poetry is words, it exists in the mind,” as if the mind were separate from the body—
PÓT: As if the mind weren’t meat! If I could take my brain out, we could look at it!
KM: I realize that we haven’t even touched on the elegiac components of these poems. Your friends whose voices are in here, who are resurrected. It’s such a beautiful aspect of the collection, and I wanted to hear you chat a little bit about elegy as a hymn.
PÓT: I love Elegy. It’s a form of music. I interviewed Martin Hayes, a great traditional Irish musician a few years ago, and he spoke about how so many of the old airs in Irish traditional music are titled about an unbearable grief, but they are a slow air, responding in beauty to unbearable grief. That is such an old intelligence in us. Beginning with a hum or an instrument. Way before we would have had psychological concepts of describing the function of such things. What is very early in the day, and is enduring, is that in the face of the unknowable and the painful, cultures all around the world have responded with beauty. That beauty is a response to pain. So, I wanted to explore that—or to continue that. We are all inheritors of poetic traditions from every country in the world that have been doing the same thing. I’m not doing anything new. I’m grateful to be somebody moved by poetry and having been shaped by poetry the whole way throughout an education.
I wanted to bear witness to that in the voices of friends. There’s the poem “The Long Table” where I mention a whole number of friends, the ways in which they live in me every day. Terribly sadly, that poem got longer as I was waiting to publish the book. Somebody else would die, somebody else would die, somebody else would die. And I’m like, “Well, here they are.” For me, that’s an evolving poem. That poem will get longer with every year, sadly. But also truthfully. It’ll be my time then, you know.
With the very particular elegy called “Kitchen Hymn” about my friend Glenn, that, too, is playing with the idea of religious belief. It’s got an epigraph from Rumi: “If anyone asks: ‘How did Jesus raise the dead?’ kiss me on the lips, say: like this!” That is a delicious demonstration of the longevity of responding to abstract ideas about resurrection or miracle with a physical thing like a kiss.
I had been waiting for Glenn to turn up in a dream, and he never did. So I made it up. That entire poem is made up apart from the end bit where I’m driving home through bright rain having sat at his desk and wept. It never happened, and hence, the last line of it echoes, “When you’re quiet I fill the gaps. Like this.” He was quiet in death. So, the poem itself points to the fact that I’m making the poem up.
KM: It occurring in your imagination doesn’t make it any less true, if the word true can be divorced from all of its baggage.
PÓT: Spencer Reece has a beautiful poem, “The Road to Emmaus.” His sponsor from a 12-step group has died and he’s devastated and he’s meeting with a nun for some spiritual direction. And the nun says to him, “What would he be doing today?” He worked as the janitor of a school, this man who was the sponsor. And he just describes an ordinary day, waking up, getting the bus, going to work, going to a meeting, having something to eat, what he’d wear. This is not an extraordinary day, or even a day of benevolence showered left, right, and center, on behalf of the sponsor. It’s just an absolutely ordinary day. It shows the power of the imagination, and what it is that we are always seeking to resurrect in us in the wake of that which has died. But it also shows that which remains, which is memory, and imagination and creativity. And those things are a way of witnessing. 
Featured image: Pádraig Ó Tuama © David Pugh