I Give You

This tree's dripping fruit
to place in your mouth
to ripen your tongue.

The water guttering down
these green leaves
to be a trellis of fingers
about you.

This soft drizzle of sunlight
to fall gentle as the petals
of meadowsweet on your cheeks.

This bindweed and all tendrils
to hook and bind
our desires together.

Inspirational Bacon

Three Monsters (Sunfire, Dedalus Press 1998) is based on Francis Bacon’s famous triptych. The visceral nature of much of his work cuts straight through to feeling and so makes writing more heart-felt and immediate, that along with the mind-bending imagery which aids innovation.


Three Monsters.


Here are three monsters :
Agony, a greyhound skinned; howl.
Hollowness, a hen plucked; peck.
Dementia, a bundle of hay; scratch.


I have stood them on furniture
to pose.


They were in the entrails of spirit,
I picked them out with a forceps.
I thought they looked remarkable in the light.
I thought the viewing public
might want to scrape at them
with their spatulas.





Attitude (Sunfire) came from another Bacon image, "Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge)".It has probably further from the spirit of the artist’s work; somehow the image engenders feelings of pity in conveying delicacy and vulnerability.

Attitude.


Who owns the child
with the withered arm-wings,
who carries the mutation that weighs a tonne;
who, when the air is full of flight, hops
and hops and hops.


See how the children littering the yard
launch like torn pages into careless flight.
Like gulls they hog the sunlight
while a sea worries far below.
This is the currency.


But who owns that child,
the child with the withered arm-wings.


Whatever about the success of the poems, Bacon’s art is wonderful.

Laughter Yoga in Rathmines

Catherine will be leading two Laughter Yoga sessions as part of ‘Festival Under The Clock’ on April 2nd in Rathmines Town Hall. The sessions are at 11am and 2pm, admission is free. She recommends you wear loose clothing, bring a yoga mat or towel to lie on, and a bottle of water.

A combination of unconditional laughter and yogic breathing, Laughter Yoga is a group activity in which laughter is induced without comedy but soon becomes contagious and yields well proven physiological and psychological benefits to those involved.

Clinical research on Laughter Yoga has proven that laughter lowers the level of stress hormones e.g. epinephrine and cortisol in the blood. It combats stress and depression, fosters positivity and hopefulness.

A trawl through some ‘laughter quotations’ confirms the above, my favourites include:

“Laughter is an instant vacation” - Milton Berle

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face” -Victor Hugo

“Laughter………. the most civilised music in the world” - Peter Ustinov

“There is little success where there is little laughter” - Andrew Carnegie

“Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.” Henry Ward Beecher

“A good, real, unrestrained, hearty laugh is a sort of glorified internal massage, performed rapidly and automatically. It manipulates and revitalizes corners and unexplored crannies of the system that are unresponsive to most other exercise methods.” Author unknown

(This latter is true, there are very impressive and genuine statistics for the value of laughter as a physical work-out. Elsewhere it has been described as an internal jog.)

For further information on ‘Festival Under The Clock’ check out: www.festivalundertheclock.webs.com