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First Love

When I was a boy cycling home from school
on evenings in late summer when the drizzle fell,
I would stop and walk naked in an ancient wood I had to pass —
warm pools and sopping leaves beneath my feet,
scents of wet earth and early fungus on the air—
until I reached a certain tree-trunk lying on its side,
barkless and smooth as bone, luscious with dark slime.

Such excitements I had there, gripping the tree with my legs,
tight with blood, sliding slowly, my mind conjuring
the creature that dwelt within; her smiles and textures:
tangles of fine roots stinking of leaf-mould,
dark fruit heavy in the hands,
a sticky trumpet flower, its stamen a thick curl,
bright pollen crusting on my groin.

Later, my body washed in the soft rain, I dressed
and cycled furiously home to mum, for hot tea and brown eggs,
that I opened like the summer with my spoon.
List of poems – click / tap to toggle
  • A Plate of Holes
  • Amber
  • An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
  • Auntie
  • Bees
  • Birds of Paradise
  • Bon Voyage
  • Cairo
  • Curve and Swoop
  • Duskfall
  • Fiddler'
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa'
  • Jessica
  • Lay my Corpse
  • Milf
  • Miss Johnson
  • On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out
  • Room of Red
  • Rosa
  • The 16A
  • The Body
  • The Carpenter’s House
  • The Child
  • The Creature by the Sea
  • The Dinner Guest
  • The Fish
  • The Ghisi Miniatures
  • The Gorgon’s Palace
  • The Iron House
  • The Nails
  • The Old Mirror
  • The Old Train
  • The Other Side
  • The Piano Tuner
  • The Shadow Garden
  • The Spinner
  • The Thorn Tree
  • The Uncles
First Love

5 – 8 October 2025 • Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Book tickets

In a city washed clean by catastrophe, four survivors circle each other in a strange new world of bewilderment, desire, and suspicion.

Love at the End of Time is a darkly absurd, mythic fantasy. Intimate, unsettling, and shot through with flashes of humour.

Written by award-winning poet and playwright Roderick Ford, whose work often draws on gothic and outsider perspectives, this play rewrites the boundaries between human and other, memory and enchantment, grief and renewal.

What might love mean when the old world has ended?

Directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks, with set & costume design by Alyson Cummins, lighting design by Stephen Dodd and sound design by Carl Kennedy, the production places raw human connection at the centre of a world on the edge of the uncanny.

Accessible Performances Available:

ISL Interpreted Performance: Friday 7 Nov, 7.45pm

RF as child
Amber

Insects dream in their vaults of amber
around her parchment neck.
The atmosphere has preserved her
for nearly three hundred years.

She lies on her shelf as one asleep,
lonely in her ancient lace.
I think of lilies growing on dark waters,
petals closed for night;

see myself as a pallid stranger,
intruding suddenly at her side,
in her chamber under the earth
of a monastery garden shrill with birds,

set in a curve of summer day.
The dreamer is inside
the dream, but the dream
is inside the dreamer.
List of poems – click / tap to toggle
  • A Plate of Holes
  • Amber
  • An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
  • Auntie
  • Bees
  • Birds of Paradise
  • Bon Voyage
  • Cairo
  • Curve and Swoop
  • Duskfall
  • Fiddler'
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa'
  • Jessica
  • Lay my Corpse
  • Milf
  • Miss Johnson
  • On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out
  • Room of Red
  • Rosa
  • The 16A
  • The Body
  • The Carpenter’s House
  • The Child
  • The Creature by the Sea
  • The Dinner Guest
  • The Fish
  • The Ghisi Miniatures
  • The Gorgon’s Palace
  • The Iron House
  • The Nails
  • The Old Mirror
  • The Old Train
  • The Other Side
  • The Piano Tuner
  • The Shadow Garden
  • The Spinner
  • The Thorn Tree
  • The Uncles
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Design: Roderick Ford and Peter FitzGerald • Privacy and cookies