---
title: "Narrative"
url: "https://ruthocallaghan.com/poems/narrative"
updated: 2026-10-12
description: "\"Narrative\", a poem by Ruth O'Callaghan from An Unfinished Sufficiency."
---

# Narrative

Narrative? There is no narrative. Unless you mean\
the mice-scratch of voices rising from the reeds’

silty bed or the latent lick of water rimming the bank\
from a rower already beyond the curve of the river.

Yet ever, as the last harsh of the late returning crow,\
deep-locked, shackles the evening, there remains,

unresolved but latched in re-arrangements of light, air,\
stealth, in a conspiracy of shadows, such a hunger

for the unremembered that even a midge or squall of dust\
recalls maps of countries no longer named and those

who have no purchase trace, with naked eye, the plane’s\
arc prinked in the sky like stars in a child’s colouring book.

_From An Unfinished Sufficiency (Salmon Poetry, 2015)_