An Extraordinary Anti-War Speech

This anti-war speech made in 2008 by war veteran Mike Prysner is extraordinary for its bravery, lucidness and honesty.

It seems to me that the powerful are so insulated from true answerability that the people are no longer rigorous at all in demanding proper morals and standards from our leaders. We seem to have reached such levels of complacency that we applaud the style, disregarding the substance. And so, a succession of patently self-serving leaders has waltzed through various corridors of power in recent years and no doubt will continue to.

Poetry is painting using words

Poets and painters are chips off the same block, here’s a selection of quotations that demonstrates it.

"Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”  

-Thomas Gray

“I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.”

 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

― Leonardo da Vinci

 “What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

― Pablo Picasso

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”

― Paul Klee

“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”  - Edgar Allan Poe

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see....”

― René Magritte

“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.”

 - Georges Brague

“Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.”

― Paul Klee

“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.”

  -Edmund Burke

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”

- Plato

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

- Marc Chagall

Remembering

A lot has been written on the subject of the Irish famine; most of what’s needed to be said has been said. However, when I found myself digging potatoes in water-logged soil beneath the Bluestacks, gathering up marble-sized potatoes; I couldn’t but be reminded of the value even these had for families whose survival depended on ground such as this. 

Hard to appreciate, but the span of two just lifetimes (by today’s standards) would land us right back into the middle of those years, and hard to credit also, that affluence and starvation still live cheek by jowl today. 

Remembering 

In November, this charcoal month of sagging

clouds slung low between granite mountains,

while the trap-jawed landscape stalks,

diggers hunched double to the ground

are harvesting bright potatoes that constantly

endeavour, like mice, to escape, scuttle back

into the sodden soil, where roots compete

for water, and decay is life rekindling.  

Round-backed labourers, boulders fallen off

the mountain, sieve the soil for each stunted práta,

(size of a fingernail, ten minutes of a child’s life),

that scampered off the sleamhán, scuttled back

into the earth, fugitives from scrabbling fingers.

Potatoes, apples of the soil, sole currency of life

to those whose DNA shaped these fingers,

now rough with working the same earth.

Where education fails

I am very doubtful about the value of much of what we accept as education. In science, for example, too much deadening information, not enough regard given to what excites a young person’s interest. I think we’ve got it backwards: enthuse the young with the cutting edge of our enquiries and they will come back for the basics.  

For example, noble prize winner, English scientist, Sir John Gurdon was the first person to clone an animal from a single cell. I mention this because his Biology report from Eton said “I believe he has ideas of becoming a scientist. On his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part, and of those who have to teach him.” 

Okay, it's only one example but it's a good one. Mind you, there are risks in making any statements as the following school reports/comments demonstrate, 

Charlotte Bronte: “She writes indifferently and knows nothing of grammar.”

WB Yeats: “Only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject.”

Albert Einstein: "He will never amount to anything"

Robert Graves: "Well, goodbye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket”

 

And there's another thing, how can education systems miss the potential in the likes of the above?

 

from "Above Ground Below Ground"

Gull I fly, spark from an anvil;

cormorant standing, sopping rag.

Goat leaps, flame flaring;

horse exhales piston jets of steam.

Hound I dart, arrowed to bull’s eye;

hare sitting on a jewelled morning.

Lizard slithers, tress down stone;

bull pounding bodhrán of the earth.

Dead End

Pared down to

tongues and mouths;

 

mouth to mouth,

tongue to tongue,

we are one.

 

At orgasm,

 

pared down

to tongues and mouths;

 

mouth to mouth,

tongue to tongue,

each is alone.

"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.