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CYPHERS MAGAZINE

Publishing poetry, prose and art since 1975

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the final issue of Cyphers is No. 100

Cyphers 100 appeared in December 2025.  For fifty years we have published poetry, fiction, artwork and criticism, and this issue features some of the longest-running writers as well as younger contemporaries.

We can no longer deal with unsolicited submissions.

Read on below: our new online poetry collection, The Annexe for new poems and translations by invited poets.

the annexe: J. Kates

J. Kates, poet and translator from New Hampshire

WINTER AUBADE

 

Frost and sun, a splendid day!

Still you sleep the hour away.

Love, it’s time you came awake:

Open up those dreamy eyes

and see the winter morning break.

You, my Northern Star, arise!

 

                        Lately it’s been rain and sleet —

heavy slush and soaking feet.

Yesterday it snowed. And snowed.

Stopped. And snowed again. We knew

not to bother with the road —

a quickly disappearing view.




We slept, yet even as we dreamed,

intermittent drifting seemed

endless, dazzling, and sublime

after the ordinary gray

We live in, a prosaic time

to get through plodding day by day.

 

But now the sun, still low, is strong

and outlines chimney smoke along

the neighbor’s wall. What will it take

to get you out of bed and go

hand in hand with me to make

fallen angels in the snow?



 

The annexe: eva bourke

Island Flowers

Und wüssten‘s die Blumen, die kleinen,

Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,

Sie würden mit mir weinen,

Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.

 

Heinrich Heine

 

In memory of my granddaughter Ruby

 

There were only four days

between your nineteenth birthday

         and the day of your death.

A few weeks later, after a sleepless night

I walk at sunrise

the narrow island road

         from Fawnmore to Cloonamore and beyond.

 

Lost to myself I say your name

to all and sundry I meet on the way,

        but do they hear me, the blazing fields,

the mountains in the distance

                shouldering the clouds away

 

the larks that toss their wild songs high into the sky,

the odd pair of sleepy-eyed sheep

        who never miss a beat

        I doubt it. No one cares.

 

Perhaps the corncrake does? She’s just returned

from the South to her corner of the field.

        But no, she shakes her rattle

        and stays out of sight.

 

 

 

 

 

But all the margins of the island road that leads

        down to the pier

are lit up with meadow flowers.

Deeply tinted and delineated as precisely

as in a medieval tapestry they turn their faces

        on me full of pity,

 

and kneeling down I gather some of them for you

        to light you on your way

wherever you are headed:

 

Bird’s foot trefoil, goose tongue,

        mouse ear chickweed – (remember

        how we laughed at their names?)

 

and pink herb Robert and forget-me-nots,

        both favourites of yours, and

red campion and dark-blue milkwort,

 

        and mint-scented mother of thyme,

and bittersweet nightshade with its violet mantle,

and above all the small blue stars of

               germander speedwell

        the lucky charm for tired travellers.

 

And finally for lightness of flight I add to your bouquet

a white-tipped silver-grey gannet feather

        picked up on the machair.

 

Already there’s the ferry filled with shadow at the pier.

          The ferryman has thrown the motor on,

                the water laps the hull.

 

I watch the vessel pull away –

           your flowers drifting in its wake –

                   and turn a corner in the hazy light

.

THE ANNEXE: CIARAN O'DRISCOLL

CIARAN O'DRISCOLL AND MARGARET FARRELLY

THE SPELLING OF AUTUMN

1.

When I said that it was Autumn,

I could sense the soft departure

of my deity and calling

as they left me to the wasteland.

This occurred as I was moving

from the failure of my harvest

in ’twenty-five, though pausing

to admire the elegant spelling

of autumn and its bonding

of m and n that made

a tacit kind of music.

‘What a lovely word,’ I mumbled

vocationless and godless

at my computer screen.

‘The rest of this existence

may flounder into nothing

but the graceful spelling of autumn

has what it takes to stay.’

2.

When I said that it was autumn,

autumn said that it was me –

we were identical

creatures losing leaves.

Heeding the long-range forecast,

I’m busy bailing out

the bilgewater at last

to sail the Stygian seas

between here and hereafter,

both cabin boy and captain

of a craft with a single mast.

Reluctant, not the least

resigned to my departure

from the shores of everyday,

I’ll bring a cherished charm

against demons or delay:

the graceful spelling of autumn

my travel pass and totem.

3.

When I said that it was Autumn,

with the stripping of the trees

and the leafy agitation,

with the failure of my harvest

and the death of my vocation,

with my fear of nervous breakdown,

distressed by all events

I prayed Emitte lucem

tuam et veritatem

but was granted no assurance,

not a prayer of breaking into

the light and truth away from

life’s headlong floundering.

What kept me compos mentis,

my one and lone asylum,

was the minuscule epiphany

of a needle’s eye redemption,

the graceful spelling of autumn.

the annexe: Pat Maddock

PLAYING MARBLES

it happens that I think of all

the vanishings I learned about in childhood

John Burnside

 

Until the day you disappeared, we’d hunker

down for the kicking power of our separate thumbs,

mark out circle and diameter, establish clear target

lines, adrift in a spatter of notions among sods

of grass in a field of unspokeness and muddied

short cuts. Our fists were packed with marbles.

 

But where did you go? To Clonmel, I later heard,

and in my mind I saw a figure taking you down

an echoing corridor of iron-framed windows,

the frosted panes just above your head height.

Never again would I see you: the point for your

centre, distance for your radius had been defined.

 

In our fists, we held clusters of cheapskate eyes –

irises were feather-like, held mysteriously in glass.

 

Note: Clonmel was the location of a former industrial school for boys.

The Annexe: Gerard smyth

TONIGHT THE SNOWFLAKES, TOMORROW THE SLUSH

 

All through the house the radiators

warm up the radiator dust.

December hyacinths are starting to die,

there’s a loose stitch I must mend in the coat

I wear through wintertime, the glacial mornings,

the jewelled evenings of January.

Another year makes its exit,

I make a list of things I want to forget.

The first is this: the cruelty of a friend’s illness

( I could barely hear his farewell whispers

when he was in the thick of it ).

That inch of snow is beginning to rise.

A door blows open admitting a chill, a flower

drops a petal, a dress falls from its hanger,

the calendar slips from a nail in the wall.

Outside in the shrubbery the birds sound anxious.

They see through the enchantment 

of snow on the ground, snow on the branches.

Risking the high jump, dropping like lead

the old tomcat with battle scars is young again.

 

 

…and a selection of poems from past issues

A job Interview
from Cyphers 97, A JOB INTERVIEW by Michael Augustin
From Cyphers No. 94, by Brian Lalor
From Cyphers 92: Michael Augustin MULTIMASKER
View Previous Issues

 

Three poems from Cyphers 99 

Kerry Hardie

GREAT VEINS FOR A NEEDLE

for my brother, Chris

 

Lacing waves finding

the odd, awkward grace

of four bluish feet,

their splash in the waves–

the aimlessness and the sweet boredom,

 

then a fly-past of starlings,

the sweep of a gull,

and a happiness-drift

like those puddles of warmth

that float in the sea:

 

that boy in blue shorts,

just peed in the water,

or that’s what you told me,

and what I believed

as we jumped the small waves

 

back in nothing-to-do-land,

of high-summer grasses

in childhood’s lost fields,

before you grew tall

and you left us.

 

 

 AQUEDUCT

 Antonella Anedda

I wake up early and I see

an aqueduct as long as a train

among the pines, clouds,

meadows, and a bunch of sheep.

 

In the train I think about the stone, lifted, steadied with calculated

force, built by slaves maintained by slaves.

I see the slope of water (it comes from the comets)

and its never-resting, the rhythm of the drops

(still today) all the way to the fountains.

 

When I arrive I lean my back against a tree and look up.

I look up high. The arcades run on in empty space.

If we don’t hear the screaming beneath the triumphal arches

and if we add the words

art and architecture and qualify them with ‘civil’

then maybe we can find a little peace

like the peace of the skeletons 

reassembled inside the museums

from
the Italian of Antonella Anedda, 

translated by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

 

OIRFÉAS

Simon Ó Faoláin

Ag cé Argostoli

tá turtar ag snámh go malltriallach

idir na báid iascaigh díomhaoine

 

le buillí fadálacha

a chrúb sciathánach,

na ribí feamnaí

ag fás ar a phlaosc

ag luascadh ina mharbhshruth

mar sreangacha briste 

ar sileadh ó thiompáin

 

 

THREE POEMS FROM CYPHERS 97 

 

IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE TAURUS MOUNTAINS

Cevat Çapan

In other words, you believe in a love that guides the sun and the other stars?
The retired colonel asks his nephew, a bitter smile on his face.
Is this bower where uncle and nephew confabulate
the place where imagination ends?
I believe the waters, winds, clouds, even the shade of a willow tree
affect the world of our feelings.
And of those things you experienced in war, and perhaps in peace too,
the roar of cannons, the smell of gunpowder,
all those wounded soldiers, the young dead,
letters that never reached their addresses
and lovers destined never again to meet? Is there no trace of any of these in your bitter smile?
They mount their horses and set off,
Alexander once passed through here, the retired colonel says,
As they descend from Gülnar to Narlıkuyu in the Taurus Mountains

translated from Turkish by Neil Doherty

MAIDIN FHLIUCH AR AVENIDA SANTA FE

Áine Uí Fhoghlú

An spéir ghlas ag scaoileadh
a maidí le sruth, cithfholcadh
maidine ag dúiseacht sráide.
Scáthanna báistí ag bláthú

i bhfad thíos fé ghile marmair
mo bhalcóin bhraonaigh.
Sioscadh roth na dtacsaithe
buí is dubh, a gcuid soilse 

báite i ngloine sráide.
Silteáin ag múchadh a dtarta,
glagaireacht na mbróg airgid,
seoda ar fhabhraí an lae.

 

‘A SAILOR MADE A GARDEN ON THE SHORE’

Antonio Machado

A sailor made a garden on the shore,
setting himself to every garden chore.
And when the whole garden was in full flower,
the gardener went off to sea once more.

Translated from Spanish by Pearse Hutchinson

 

Two poems from Cyphers 96

FRIDGE

by Mary Noonan

A shelf in a tall black mausoleum
is crammed with jars – prickly pear,
rhubarb and ginger, damson,
groseille intense, apricot.
A black cape shawls the ceiling
of the ice-box, blue mould seals
the half-eaten jellies in their glass
sarcophagi. Most were bought when
you were here – four years under
the pall, fruit sugars and spices
rotting in a molasses-dark marinade.
To touch them would be to halt
the small wooden train beetling
through the sun-speckled groves
of Majorca, orange and lemon leaves
reaching through an open window to
touch us as we bobbed to the sea.

MAYO

by Howard Wright

Time on your hands
where the roads come to die.
Everyone about their business;
an indifference to hairdressers,
a modesty of pubs.
Multi-purpose stores
are smithereens of sunlight.
Time at your beck and call.
Every other door is a postcard
you will write eventually.
Words are like hills in your mouth.
Rain on a river makes the sea
but a fire behind the window
is a snug in the darkness.
Time wasted is well spent.

from No. 95

BATTERED

by Maurice Scully

here is the news & weather

pluck a string

wait      repeat      vary

put a plum on a plate

get the brushes out

clear the mind

pare an apple

get stuck in

[if the source be close]

here is the news & weather

a thin slice in time

through a rising population

they call it Intercultural Post-Media Studies

we sing dumb

here is the news & weather

when the sun swells up &

burns off oceans & human

cultures if not long long

gone by then incinerate

& your home planet & histories

& languages & talents

& pitiful bitternesses

vanish with

uncountable myriad

intricately beautiful

microscopic diatom

& poetry of course fizzles

to ash & its ash is swept

forever away

then …

 

here is the news & weather

 

 ANCIEN RÉGIME

 by Elisa Audino

Poetry is revolution,

wrote Amiri Baraka,

and the revolutionary is he who curses inequality

from the street.

Rap was revolutionary at the beginning,

Trap for ten seconds, at least the idea,

the Beats for about twenty years,

jazz while it was black.

Italian poetry expresses 

its revolution in the rhyming couplet

or in words like dismal, skull, sepulchral.

The Classics, it says.

Conservation, it means. 

translated by William Wall

 

from No. 94

KOAT NEWS AT 6

 by Alanna Offield 

As the signal buffers its way from the air-conditioned newsroom
to the edge of the fire, the young reporter nods her head for slightly too long.
Yes, she says, thousands more acres, hundreds more evacuations
the biggest active fire in the country, the biggest in New Mexican history maybe
and I wonder is there something of pride in the recognition. I am listening
for her accent. Decoding if she belongs to these burning mountains
or if she chose them, if when she got the job in Albuquerque,
they told her to tone it down, to remove the music of her words because viewers
wouldn’t understand her, it would remind them too much of the family they left behind
for the city. I wonder did she record herself speaking and play it back until
her sentences stopped curling at the ends like smoke.

CAT SA LEABA

le Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Cat carad, agus mé ar cuairt chuige,
bhuail sí isteach sa seomra
nuair a bhíos chun dul a chodladh
agus ligeas di fanacht in aice liom –
bhí teas agus fionnadh uaim;
ach dúisiodh mé ag a trí a clog,
mar bhí sí ag cíoradh mo ghruaige lena hingne
is ag brú orm, a srón beagnach sáite
isteach im’ chluas. Níor dhein sí crónán ar bith,
lean uirthi ag obair chun rud éigin a chur
i gcuimhne dom, ag obair i ndáiríre
chun go dtuigfinn, ach theip uirthi,
bhí an codladh ró-throm. Ansan thosnaigh sí ag caoineadh
agus bhí orm éirí agus í a scaoileadh amach
faoin oíche, mé cosnochta ar urlár fuar.
Ar maidin,
bhí ionadh orm faoin rud a tharla, ach
cén fáth nár thuigeas pé rud a bhí i gceist?
Nach mar sin a bhíonn an scéal,
an fhilíocht ag breith orainn le greim –
le greim an uafáis, sa dorchadas
is ag imeacht arís gan fiú focal amháin
agus an dualgas fágtha aici romhainn,
an eachtra a thuiscint, conas a tharla
tiomnú cait a bheith chomh deacair san a mhíniú?

 

Monet in Árann

for Kathleen Loughnane

by Moya Cannon.

Over the drystone, sunstruck wall
we were ambushed by the sway
and scent of a July meadow—
whites of tall daisy and yarrow,
purples of scabious and cranesbill,
the bitten yellow of cat’s ear,
blue tremble of harebell,
and more flowers that we couldn’t name,

but we were caught, are caught still,
in the blurry, summery sway of it.

Moya Cannon’s Collected Poems were published by Carcanet in 2021. moyacannon.ie

BIA TIARGÁLAÍ (Scott san Antartach)

le Gréagóir Ó Dúill.

Fán am a dtagaim ar an fhírinne sa channa stáin
Bíonn an lipéad stríoctha stróctha.
Bíonn an fhírinne searbh,  an fíorscéal cam.
Aithním na lanna faobhair le cois na gcrúb beannaithe oscailte,
Na cineálach uirlise a fhuasclaíonn an fheoil;  seachnaím mo pholladh féin
Agus leagaim an fheoil gona súlach ar phláta fuar
Ag súil nár lobhadh é.

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From a reading at the Cork Spring Literary Festival in February 2014. Macdara Woods reads  his poem about the suburban village of Ranelagh, home of Cyphers and of many notable characters.
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