Rathmines Community Clubs n Soc's Day

A new departure in this part of town and maybe the first of many: Rathmines Community Clubs n Soc's Day, Saturday, 24th March from 12:00 until 17:00 in Rathmines Town Hall.

This is a free event which presents the community in the Rathmines area with an opportunity to meet members from a variety of organisations (clubs, societies, volunteering organisations and community groups)active in their locality, to get information on activities, events and membership.

So grab the opportunity to become more active, part of what's happening. The day is being organised by Cultural and Corporate Project Management students in Rathmines College.

See you there.
Michael

Swan Fashion Show in aid of Our Lady's Hospice and Care Services

A cause worth supporting. The Swan Fashion Show in aid of Our Lady’s Hospice and Care Services will take place at 8.45pm on Tuesday 27th March in the Swan Centre, Rathmines.

The show, which is being organised by Rathmines College in association with the Swan Centre, promises to be a very enjoyable night out with audience having the option of arriving in 20’s style clothing,(spot prizes for the best), and for a paltry €20 (VIP)having a few glasses of wine too.

Tickets cost €10 and €20 and can be bought at The Candy Bar in the Swan Centre from Fri 16th March. Doors for VIPs 8.20pm.

Email: rathminesccpm@gmail.com

November Leaf

The maple leaf had all the colours I wish you.
A parchment clinging to a web of veins,
a fallen star lying on the path by the river,
somehow it seemed right.

The greatest beauty is the fragile beauty,
that’s what I thought of you;
with the blue barely clinging to your irises,
your smiles precarious as November leaves.

Trap

I was in a hawthorn,
trapped in its branches;
all arms, hands and fingers
prevailing on me not to struggle.

I was an exhibit in a jar
ragged and shock-eyed,
praying for a passer-by
where ravens perch still for hours.

I was a storm-blown tatter
caught in another’s stitching;
my cries drifting into the sky
nonchalant like dandelion seeds.

(from Turn Your Head)

Banned Books

A selection of paintings from “We Exercise The Power” is currently on display in Rathmines Library. The exhibition has been travelling around various libraries countrywide since last August.

It’s an unusual project, “100 watercolour paintings of 100 books by 100 author's who have at one time or another been banned in Ireland throughout the last century.” John Jones is the artist, and you can read about and see the paintings at http://johnjonesartist.blogspot.com/

We know Ireland has seen some enthusiastic censors in its time, particularly where books offended Catholic sensibilities, but still the list makes surprising reading and includes Gulliver’s Travels, Molloy by Samuel Beckett, Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye, John Updike’s Rabbit,Run and many others. That’s a taster, have a look yourself.

This prompted me to look a bit wider. A list of books that have been (at some time) banned internationally includes pearls such as, Candide by Voltaire (USA), Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (South Africa), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Soviet Union), Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (Canada), Ulysses by James Joyce (UK, USA, Austrailia), The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank (Lebanon), The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (USA).

Marine.

Prostrate on the beach,
a slop of sea pulse,
a glob black as chewed tobacco
fallen from the lip.


My mother said -
the sea is sick,
it's breath on the beach is bad
and its puke is scattered
all over the sand.


She said
all its pin points are boiling,
its stomach heaves;
that it will yellow our skin
if it gets half a chance.


Then this morning,
when something with small eyes
came out of the sea,
I pelted stones at it
till the tractor came.

(from Sunfire)

How poetry can save your life

John Betjeman, at one time Britains’s Poet Laureate and best-selling poet, produced umpteen lovable rhyming poems. I’m very fond of them myself. So lovable, they saved his life.

Betjeman was a press attache in the British embassy in Dublin in the early years of the WW2. He was also working very successfully for British Intelligence. He appears to have had a winning way him and befriended many who hitherto would not have had any truck with his likes. (He got on well with Paddy Kavanagh). He was, however, picked up by the IRA radar and they plotted to kill him.

Poetry saved him. Years later Diarmuid Brennan, the IRA army council's head of civilian intelligence, wrote to him saying, "I came to the conclusion that a man who could give such pleasure with his pen couldn't be much of a secret agent. I may well be wrong". And on this basis, the plot was abandoned.

Now, there is no doubt that the poetry suggests a sort of loveable old versifier with a very English take on life, ‘a spot of tennis’ type of thing. But maybe the IRA needed an expert in poetry analysis, because behind this outer veneer, the poems are very accomplished indeed.

Tonight I Nearly Died.

Tonight I nearly died
in the Sunday chain
returning to Dublin.
A scythe
arched onto the road;
as I rushed
I nearly overtook life.

What did I learn?

My eyes are good
dilated in horror.

Familial Conflict

The wars go deeper, the psychology is deeply considered and brutal, the routes beneath the skin are so well known. No surprise then that civil wars are so ugly. No surprise that familial conflict is often savage.

No Tanks, No Guns,


neither mercy nor rules,
no limits;

not dogs nor even their teeth,
just ourselves quarrelling.

How dexterously we tease
at each other's sores,

making our incisions
with surgical precision.

This wonderful photograph by John Minihan appeared in Shadows From the Pale, Portrait of an Irish Town, (Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, London, 1996). The church dates from the sixties. If ever a photographer caught the incongruity of architectures from different times, it is here. And this picture gave me ammunition for a few short poems.


The Dressmaker


Eileen Johnston lived in one of cottages on Convent Lane;
her sign barely fitted between hall-door and eaves.
Long hours she spent, years fitting and pinning up,
face to her Singer lamp, tracking the straightness of seams,
crawling the railways of the world.

Women came with pictures of dinner-dance dresses or for alterations,
but less and less as the shop lights grew brighter,
their windows bigger, bigger than the cottages on Convent Lane;
and all the time the new church below was pointing away;
pointing away to the future.

-----------------------

The new church was a rocket
heaven-bound;
it soared
beyond Convent Lane.

The old cottages glared
at the wall opposite,
praying the rocket
be on its way.

Missing Guinness Advert

I'm very partial to a pint of Guinness,and for the moment I'm able to afford one or two, (though that could change anytime soon).

And I've enjoyed their ads over the years, particularly those going back a bit e.g.



A lot of them are available online but the one I'd really like to see,"The Big Wave", is only available as a very poor fragment. It was a cinema staple for years back in the seventies;you have no idea how beautifully those turquoise waves washed over my Galway days. This is all I can find,the music is wrong and I have a real yearning to hear that music again.

inside this room,
this rain,
light is a mood

like
cigarette smoke
or drizzle

or cloud;
we hang within it,
our brains lanterns.

A New Order Please

As time goes by, as establishments age, their charters/constitutions age and they become more estranged from their constituencies. Organizations become locked into their time while the people they serve and their circumstances change. Our establishment, in all its facets, becomes inadequate.

And so, governments and their agencies enact regulations to embed themselves into society, removing themselves from their pioneering beginnings, regulating us into their paradigms for existence.

Politicians, even well-meaning, serve their parties rather than their people. Leaders serve established bodies, national and international. They become slaves to the ivory towers of establishment rather than heroes of their peoples.They endeavour to endoctrinate us on their infallibility, they can never for example admit to mistakes; they make no mistakes. This is my experience in Ireland; it appears to be case in the US, the UK, the EU and everywhere I look.

The power brokers have, I think, through accumulating regulation upon regulation, insulated themselves from answerability; it’s time to vote them en-masse, internationally, out.

Free Energy

Almost,if they'll allow it.

They Gave Me a Chair

They Gave Me A Chair.

I either read about or saw a picture of Simone de Beauvoir sitting on a chair above the grave at Sartre's funeral.That image of a woman sitting above a grave with the backdrop of the thousands that turned out for Sartre's funeral is strange. Somehow sitting on the chair makes wallpaper of the crowds.And I imagine the act of sitting would, for some reason, alter your thinking.

They gave me a chair
so I could sit beside the grave,
like a woman painted in
after the funeral crowds had gathered.

And I, his lover, looking down
as though this earth was some sort of heaven,
thinking
I'd prefer it south-facing
or he could do with a bit more space
or some other such nonsense.

Then, alone again, I found,
fixed above all my memories,
the picture of a coffin
on the floor of an empty room
as seen from above.

(from Sunfire)