Ciaran Parkes, Ireland's National Honour, September 2026
Ciaran Parkes wrote the highest-scoring poem from Ireland in the Writory International Poetry Contest, September 2026: Her Phthisical Husband, scored 88 out of 100 by the blind judging panel across five published criteria. The poem was read in English, Latin script.
Her Phthisical Husband
Her Phthisical Husband I read about a woman in 1862 in Ohio, her husband lying sick for eight weeks before his death, using his fevered body to incubate fifty hens' eggs, wrapped in cotton, laid beside him in the bed. Unable to move a limb, he was as still as an emperor penguin, waiting through the winter. His wife, caring for him, turned the eggs twice daily. He lived to see them safely hatched, forty-six new chicks stretching their wings, not as doves of mourning, or as symbols of a life to come. The report describes him as her phthisical husband. I have to look up the unknown word. I almost could have thought it was another word for love.
Every country's leading poet each month is named on the September 2026 National Honours. The contest is open to poets in Ireland and everywhere else: enter the current round, and every poem receives a score out of 100 and a certificate.