"Black Men Ski"

“Some kids I’ll describe as friends
  say I am race-obsessed. 
  The luxury of your opinion
  shows that you are blessed.” - Stew
Singer/songwriter Stew, strong words and a strong performance. 

Music is a stream

Music is a stream

whose fingers, knuckling over boulders,

send droplets trickling into crevices, tinkling;

gurgles bass notes in hollows beneath the rocks,

spills soprano trills

that burst into the white noise of spray.

Music is the wind

that whistles high notes in the leaves

low in a bowl of mountain-side;

that whistles sad through a stone wall;

laughs in a stand of nettles.

Music is all that stirs on the earth;

blackbird standing on the dawn,

trout etching circles at noon,

the raucous crows bickering with evening,

a fox tearing a hole in the night-time.

Dylan Thomas Reads A Child's Christmas in Wales

 

A beautiful reading by Dylan Thomas; and then listen to him reading my favourite poem, Fern Hill; (follow the link below). 

A Child's Christmas in Wales:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjCJd9Bc-qA
Fern Hill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XG1B_7r4y8

Happy Christmas.

Yesterday

Almost a year to the day since I visited Pearse Hutchinson in St James Hospital and found him in great form. He talked  about a nurse he met on his ward; I said he should write the poem; he said he was old and needed to rest that I should  write it.That was our last conversation.

Yesterday

 

A poem

you said I should write. 

An African nurse on your ward,

born the day after her  grandmother died,

called Yesterday. 

She was gone as soon,

nurses from the agency come and go;

good relationships are important

for the patients, you explained. 

And now you are gone;

is this that poem?

In Rathmines

A group of students from the Higher National Diploma in Media (Journalism)in Rathmines College are working on a new website to bring together all things Rathmines: businesses, services, clubs, societies, history, events, you name it...........

The website should be up and running by March, but in the meantime they have put in place a facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/InRathmines, a twitter site, https://twitter.com/InRathmines, and a blog, http://inrathmines.blogspot.ie/, which are already very active. If you have an interest in bringing people into Rathmines for business, leisure or otherwise, you would do well to support these sites.

On a parallel track, Rathmines Community Clubs n Soc's Day, 2013 will take place on 27th April; if you are interested, you know where I am.

Paradise Lost in Trinity College Dublin

Reminding you of Paradise Lost read-a-thon, Friday 14th December 2012, starting at 10 a.m. in the GMB, Trinity College and re-locating to College Chapel from 2 p.m. Among the readers are Seamus Heaney (at 10am), Eilean Ní Chuilleanáin, Joseph Woods, Gerard Smyth, Macdara Woods, Leeanne Quinn, Peter Denman, David Norris, Iggy McGovern, Terence Brown, and many others. It will continue through the day till approx. 8.30pm. My halfpence-worth comes somewhere around 5.30pm. It’s all in a good cause, raising funds for the National Council for the Blind. So for a bit of devilment, why not call into Trinity on Friday.

Mashed Up Yeats

I have no doubt that Yeats was the greatest poet writing in the twentieth century. He had the complete poet’s palette. I thought it might be interesting to mash up his lines and see what emerged. So with only his own lines recombined, a few changes to punctuation and the position of line endings, this is what I got, (apologies to the purists): 

from the mouths of old men:

I heard the old, old men say,

when you are old and grey

the world is full of magic things:

embroidered cloths

enwrought with golden and silver light,

silver apples of the moon,
golden apples of the sun,
faery vats,
full of berries
and of reddest stolen cherries.

All that's beautiful drifts away
like the waters,

for everything that's lovely is

but a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

On the stuff of dreams:

When sleepers wake and yet still dream,

Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come.

All hatred driven hence,

The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees
 —Those dying generations— at their song.

 O, but we dreamed to mend

Whatever mischief seemed to afflict mankind,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

If there’s no hatred in a mind,

Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

On love:

I whispered, 'I am too young,'

And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.

Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars
Till the stars had run away.

We taste and feel and see the truth:

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love:
Beauty passes like a dream,
All true love most die.

The Start of It

              

This is the start of it:

the clay palm hitting the face,

bags packed, colours away;

all my flares quenching into the distance. 

It begins: the spectrum loses a stripe,

the red berries fall,

light leaves;

morning’s a corpse. 

This is the way of it: 

table set and unset, crossed knives and forks:

insignia of the tamed and helpless;

rain dribbling, failed  flames. 

This powder insistence:

stampede of padded hooves,

retreat to reverse;

the days worn thin with walking back and forth

Digging Potatoes

This first year, the potato plants in the water-logged soil beneath the mountains made a bedraggled- looking crop. They went in late, so we dug them in late October.  

As we uncovered them, I kept thinking how they would have looked to famine-time diggers. Bright nuggets, valuable as gold; each a life-saving package of food. Each clod of earth yielding, or not, its life-saving load. Each decent-sized potato bringing a rush of relief, each marble a disaster. 

How carefully they must have dug with their children’s lives at stake; potatoes rolling away with the loosened soil, disappearing into the ground, fingers scrambling after them. How it must have bound families together in their struggle to survive; how strong must their kinship with the soil have been.

 

A different life now: my kitchen stocked with oranges from Spain, olive oil from Italy, wine from France; leisure filling the space that was filled with struggle and fertile soil disappearing under concrete.

You Chose This

No one lives with the moon, no one could;

the moon is beautiful, too beautiful;

a sentence to loneliness. 

Night after night, catching glimpses of lovers

through half-pulled curtains, it loiters,

bleaches their bodies with arctic disdain; 

solitude freezes the heart.

Corporal Punishment

Mise Raifteirí an file,

Lán dúchais is grádh,

Le súile gan solas,

Le ciúnas gan crá. 

The opening quatrain to the famous gaelic poem fairly rolls off the tongue; it is perhaps the easiest few lines to memorise I’ve ever come across. However I had major problems memorising it owing  to the terror of been beaten yet  again by a teacher I encountered during my  schooldays in Roscommon. Over the course of a year, I was slapped numerous times across the face each time I had this teacher. Well learned verses flowed out of my head like sand.   

In my schooldays, primary and secondary, I and most others in my class groups were struck, (usually on the palms, one teacher liked to catch the back of the fingers on the upswing), with a snooker cue, bamboo, an assortment of kitchen-chair legs, leathers. Imagine: even then, (60’s, 70’s), there was an industry making leather straps with hand-grips for beating pupils.

That culture was accepted to the point that there was no point telling your parents; children were wrong. 

On one occasion, in preparation for catholic Confirmation, the class group was being examined on its knowledge of Christian Doctrine. The questioner went around each student in turn asking catechism questions. When a boy failed a question he got four slaps with the leg of a chair. On and on it went till there were just 2 boys standing. One of these failed somewhere in the twenties and got four slaps. The brightest boy in the class went on past the fiftieth question; when he eventually failed he was hit harder than the rest of us. Our guess was that this teacher revelled in his only opportunity ever to hurt this boy.

 

It was a time of institutionalised cruelty and total disrespect for humans under a particular age. The two examples above show how two people I would credit as basically decent were corrupted by their habitual use of corporal punishment.

Movies, Dreams and Gorgeous Faces

                                                    

 

 

 

                                                Ace Jackalope YouTube



Movies, Dreams and Gorgeous Faces

 

 

Ok, it's your movie house;

 

you got the doors shut tight;

 

out here’s ice.

 

Pacin’ up and down,

collar a chimney;

my cigarette smoke - tension.

 

Lookin’ at you:

we used t’share the picture house;
 

you’re gorgeous.

 

Twelve thirty, not a flicker;

I turn away, take the second left;

I'm in my bedroom.

 

Neon flashing red in my face -

she loves me, loves me not, loves me.....,

I keep repeating it;

 

the stammer occupies me.
 

.

 

To the Professors at Trinity

This poem was written a number of years ago in response to a sculpture of a grouping of professors/teachers by Simon O'Donnell. Tongue in cheek, the poem pokes fun at the traditional rituals of universities and "old boy" schools and colleges; it could as easily be directed at the wigged personages officiating in our courts.

 

 

 

 

  The Circle.

 

Now dried tobacco leaves, these professors,

 

whose intellectual travails have scoured them skinny,

 

are engaged in the Spring ritual on the back lawn at Trinity.

Stripped naked, buttocks slung low over the crew-cut grass,

 

hands beating mortar boards; they sway on their haunches,

 

loosening the centuries' compaction of soil grains. 

 

Some say they are whipping up the aurae of their forebears,

 

others that they are resonating with the pain of earthworms

 

as they shift, right to left, on the balls of their feet. 

 

At the center, standing on a box, a physics-doctor

 

with plumb-line hanging from between forefinger and thumb

 

is demonstrating down. 

 

I have watched them for an age, seen their growth rings

 

appearing like water-marks, the knowledge in their face-pouches

 

guarded like genitalia in a bag.

Christine Takes To The Air.

Slipped on ice;

prim, haughty

Christine

takes to the air.

Wow, what a moment;

Christine,

the unabridged version,

totally graceless. 

Never on speaking terms;

from now on

I'm gonna greet her,

" hi yer"

trees keening

Another beautiful painting by Elaine Leigh.The trees invested with human features, and life in the their wind-blown hair mirroring the neolitic artwork beneath the earth.

Trees keening winter nights away;

their wails woven into the wind. 

Heads of hair like seaweed from the strand,

knots tailing limply towards the sea.  

Underground, roots twisted toward some source,

shaped by memory. 

Trees like abandoned lovers,

scratching down the marble of night-time.

   

(Image by and  poem from a collaboration entitled "Above Ground Below Ground")