Victoria Kennefick: 'Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016'

 

I recall first reading Victoria Kennefick's poem 'Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016' at least a couple of years ago. The poet is from County Cork, Ireland, and the poem was first published in Poetry Ireland Review in 2016, around the 100th anniversary of the Easter 1916 Rising. (The GPO, or General Post Office, is one of the most famous buildings not only in Dublin but in all of Ireland, because it was the headquarters of the Easter Rising.) Now, you can both read and listen to a reading of the poem here, on the iamb website: https://www.iambapoet.com/victoria-kennefick 

This is absolutely one of my favourite poems of the past several years. In 20 lines, Kennefick captures humour, pathos, history, and the total insanity of being a teenager - the latter being possibly the most difficult accomplishment of all. 

The poem pays tribute to "those boys in uniform" but it also captures the problematic ways in which our countries teach us history: "all the men of history sacrificing/themselves for Ireland, for me, these rebel Jesuses." This obviously isn't a particularly healthy perspective, but what brings me close to tears in these lines is also how true it is to how teenage girls think, or at least some teenage girls. Falling in love with dead heroes is just the kind of thing a lot of us did at 16. At the end of the poem, when the speaker says "I put my lips/to the pillar...I kiss all those boys goodbye", we understand that some day she'll look back at this as a crazy, sentimental, teenage moment. And yet, we also kiss those boys goodbye along with her and we feel the poet's empathy for those in history who were lost to war, and her equal empathy for the wild emotions of the teenage years. 

Image: The shell of the GPO on Sackville Street (later O'Connell Street), Dublin in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising. Date: May ? 1916 NLI Ref: KE 121