Ragged Rainbows, Julie McNeill
Dreich, 2022 £5.00
Insomnia
There’s a lot in these poems to which I couldn’t relate. I’ve never considered the possibility I might smash through a glass ceiling and — while I’ve worked in bars — I’ve never had my boss, a friend of my father’s (as in the poem ‘Independence’), lift
my top up over
my face, so his friends
could see what a teenager’s
tits looked like
But yes, I do know what it’s like not to be able to power-down, and not to be able to sleep when I desperately want, and need, to sleep. And yes ‘My insomnia looks a lot like / loneliness / at the bottom of a stone cold / 2am tea run.’ It even
masquerades
as habit
and shape shifts into
productivity.
[‘Insomnia’]
And there’s a lot else in Julia McNeill’s poems that I suspect will keep even the best sleeper awake. There are the numbers that keep on growing in ‘Even the rainbows’, for example:
the scales swinging in all
the wrong directions. Others
like bank accounts, seem to flatline
with no sign of revival.
And surely most of us will struggle to sleep; will toss, turn and feel helpless after reading ‘Rohingya’, in which
A boy’s broken
face headlines the crowd.
Tear stained,
palms open,
waiting
for someone
to complete
the handshake
and lead him home.
And instead of counting sheep, might we lie awake counting the miles we drove this week when we could have caught a bus or walked? Or, like the narrator in ‘Smile, Greta,’ be haunted by the number of times we chose to eat a certain food:
We’ve got four different
coloured bins,
and I’m counting
red meat sins
in my recyclables.
These are poems that will not just keep you awake but will awaken you to the way you live and its consequences. Don’t lose sleep in vain — adapt, alter, change.