Cora Crampton
Cora Crampton hails from south Kildare, Ireland and lives one field away from Blackhall Castle’s Sheelagh na gíg. Cora is an emerging poet who is passionate about Irish history. Cora holds a BA (History and English) and an MA (English Literature) both acquired following her retirement from the workplace in 2018. Cora was awarded the Lord Walter Medal and the Chiefs’ and Clans Prize for original historical research. Her non-fiction work has been broadcast on RTE Radio One and published in History Ireland and various journals. Cora’s paper on W.B. Yeats’s collaboration with Frank O’Connor in the translation of the Irish poetry of dispossession was published in the November-December 2024 edition of Irish University Review.
The Rag Tree
This isn’t a tree, it’s a wound—a hawthorn bush
hunched near the cliff’s face, roots clawing
at stone, resisting the Atlantic. The wind grabs
at everything’s edges, like hands
pulling open a coat.
Strangers leave their ‘rubbish for wishes’ on the haw’s
branches: gum wrappers, air fresheners
shaped like pine trees, a Tayto bag tied tight,
a disposable mask, damp and blue.
Offerings flapping, half-alive,
clinging but brittle.
I visit and leave a ribbon torn from a dress.
The one you bought me.
The knot I tie is part atonement, part spell—
if I don’t tie it tight, it might drift away,
taking the wish with it.
Wish or prayer—I’m not sure I know the difference.
What am I looking for?
To erase a moment in the past,
to pull out
a splinter of glass.
At the base of the tree, coins pile up,
green with oxidation,
another currency in this curious game.
It’s a bit daft, the whole thing, and still,
as I press my thumb to a ten cents piece,
the childish voice in my head says:
If you say it out loud,
it won’t come true.
