Rosaline lives in Derry, Northern Ireland along with her independent rescue cat, Beannacht, and Hereditary Amyloidosis, a rare, genetic, ultimately fatal condition originating in a fifteen-mile ribbon of coastline in Donegal, for which there was no treatment until a few years ago. She has self-published her book ~ Donegal Amy: A Rare Inherited Disease from Ireland and is the Founder of Amyloidosis Ireland Support Group.

Her poems appear in Heartland and Threshold by the Community Arts Partnership, Drawn to the Light Press, Issue 8, Brick by Brick by Silver Apples, and Autumn Fragments by the Seamus Heaney Homeplace.

She read her poem Offering on the Eat the Storms’ All Ireland Poetic Relay Race Podcast in April 2024.

Her poem, Polydipsia, was shortlisted in the Saolta Arts Poems for Patience 2022 competition and Parenthesis features on a Bogside Mural.

A runner-up in the Poetry Slam at Derry’s inaugural literary festival in 2023, she’s a committee member of the Society of Author’s Poetry and Spoken Word Group. Rosaline is 64, five feet, slightly round, and spends her time writing, ignoring housework, killing houseplants, and trying to cuddle the aforementioned cat.

Rathlin Island

Sailing, sailing now, from Ballycastle Bay across the Sea of Moyle

and her currents of boiling porridge where the Children of Lir

swam for three hundred years,

sweeping over mermaids and shipwrecks

past the whirlpool, Swallow of the Sea, to Rathlin Island,

like an upside-down boot, four miles in width

and marinated in mystery and myth.

Between Rathlin and mainland

an enchanted isle from beneath the waves appears

every seven years, where, should an earthly stone

gathered from under a left foot be thrown,

the sea forever forfeits claim.

At Bull Point’s upside-down lighthouse,

a city of seabirds clings to skyscraper crags

and chicks cleave to sea-stacks crowned with mitres of mist.

Guillemots, razorbills, fulmars, puffins and kittiwakes

congregate in the chapels of cliff edges

and a cacophony of bird calls soars like hymns over the Atlantic.

Foraging, foraging then, for refuge in Altnacarry Cave,

an exiled Scottish king, inspired by a most persistent spider,

returned to Bannockburn and victory.

Wailing, wailing then, on Crocascreedlin, the Hill of Screaming,

as MacDonald women and children cleaved to each other,

watched their menfolk slaughtered in the Hollow of Great Defeat,

before being flung alive from cliffs to unmerciful rocks below.

Flying, flying now, are peregrine falcons and a pair of great skua

over fields embroidered with standing stones,

adorned by handcrafted walls where the nimblest faeries in Ireland

dance on the round pillars

as inquisitive blue-eyed seals bask at Usher Point

and the golden hares of Roonivoolin prance

on carpets of rare pink and purple orchids.

Sailing, sailing then, from Church Bay, five hundred souls

compelled by Great Hunger, walked onto ships ~

eyes cast back to flocked islanders waving farewells

as the masts sailed inexorably towards, and then over, heart’s horizon ~

to lands where dreams turned upside-down ~

to absence, fresh hardships, and sickness for home.

On the culled island, all that is left of them ~

a commemorative stone.