For Culture Night 2025, Guest Editor Belinda McKeon has curated a number of works from emerging creative talents of note - read Brazilian-Irish poet Rafael Mendes' Searching for Grandfather below.
Searching for Grandfather
you are a stranger whose blood runs in our veins / but blood clots
-Malika Booker
.
Twenty-five per cent of what I am is made of you.
Two-and-a-half fingers pigmented in vitiligo patches
an equal part of toes whose inability on the pitch
worsened my uncle's nail-biting, chipped his teeth;
fractional parts of corneas, lens, and optic nerves,
but not the iris: I did not inherit your green eyes.
Out of your absence, I counterfeit memories.
Going for bread and cheese, we come upon a trail of pharaoh ants
sectioning an apple, and you recite a tale about
saving a portion of today’s abundance for tomorrow’s misery.
Leaning on a fence, we watch waves of Nellore cattle
roaming forage crops, tails whipping flies,
hoofs digging and tossing soil into the milk-scented afternoon.
I display your surname, hoping to be identified,
to be patted on the shoulder in a bar by a man
whose long-dead friend carried the same title,
and eyed the world by dint of two imperial jades.
About The Writer: Rafael Mendes is a Black Brazilian-Irish poet whose work has recently appeared or is upcoming in Banshee, Wasafari, gorse, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023, and his pamphlet, The Migrant Dictionary (Howl New Irish Writing), was a co-winner of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Pamphlet Series 2025. He's a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at Trinity College Dublin and an Early Career Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub.
