The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For November, we are delighted to publish three new works by Brian Kirk. The first of these, ‘Keepsakes‘, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. 

Keepsakes

We kept our grandparents in a dusty box

high on top of the wardrobe in my parents’ room.

We never took it down, happy enough to know

they were there. We kept my father in the station

office down the road and my mother in the kitchen

by the range. We never had to look for them,

we knew that they were always there. They kept us,

their children, scattered around the house and garden

or the surrounding fields. One day when they went out

to look for us, we were nowhere to be found, blown

by the wind, dispersed, dissolved by time.

Brian Kirk has published two poetry collections with Salmon Poetry, After The Fall (2017) and Hare’s Breath (2023). His poem ‘Birthday’ won Irish Poem of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition and was published by Southword Editions in 2019. He is a recipient of Professional Development and Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. His novel Riverrun was chosen as a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022.