Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

‘Siena 1978’: a poem by Bernard O’Donoghue

Siena 1978

‘the red-haired girl from Palaeography’

The photograph was taken when the sun broke through
And shone on the copper red of her hair
As we sat in the Piazza del Campo
After seven days of unrelieved rainfall.
We’d come out from seeing the Lorenzetti
Frescos: Good and Bad Government,
And the attendant golden-haired angels
Surrounding the Virgin and her child.

Later that evening, back in the palazzo
Of the Sorelle Bandini, we watched the news
And saw the police blanket covering
The body of Aldo Moro in the street
And fretted for the unborn infant
With us on our way from place to place.

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Bernard O’Donoghue

Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Cullen, Co Cork in 1945. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and two collections shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Farmers Cross (2011) and The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016). He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006), and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber.