Dublin Poetry Magazine

Dublin Poetry Magazine –

"What We've Left" by Shannon Carpenter

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September 15th, 2026

Dublin Poetry Contest #3 – First Place

What We've Left

by Shannon Carpenter

Butchered words blaring from buses and trams
Names that had some kind of meaning, surely
To some kind of man, clothed in brat and leine, looking at us from behind
The words still now etched onto our tongues yet ripped from our gums

A diaspora drowned, mourned, woken
Becoming foam on waves and washing up
Still singing, on faraway shores

The shores that took their song
Stitched it into themselves like a badge of honour
Like evidence of our lives, their love for us

Many many singers and speakers of truth
Of the blood that dripped from trees at Clontarf
Of rusted, long untouched tools like tongues
Of names, like wind, flowing through the ears of those who care to listen

Sweet bursting currents soaked in tea.
A sleepy, salty sunday that melted in your mouth like the past itself
Deep brown crumbs like holes, still in the kitchen floor.

What could fare have been, had man stayed at home?
Grew his past on his line's land and dreamt of here? 
What could have grown in this bastion at the beginning of the world?
Would those in another time look at us in shame, in grief, or in some far off starvation
At the hungry space that was our history?

About the Poet
Shannon Carpenter resides in Tallagt, Dublin, Ireland.
Read the poet's biography and Wax Poetry and Art publications
on Shannon Carpenter's Artist Page.

This poem is also featured in Comet #9,
published in the Wax Poetry and Art Library.

Keywords: Irish history, hunger, language

Previously published in Dublin Poetry Magazine:
Life's Grand Dance
by Claire Lyons

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