A little goes a long way

I have over the years come across some examples of very little making the difference between life and death. In caring for the elderly, sometimes it is food for the spirit that makes the difference. This poem instances a particular case; the improvement was spectacular.

In the Home 

Sitting quietly by her bed,

among those sobbing, groaning women.

A room claustrophobic with impending death;

her spirit withered inside her,

her mind ran away to the fifties.  

But given a bed near the window,

her mind cranked up.

It was the birds on the lawn,

the grubbing thrushes and blackbirds:

they found perches for her brain.

Almost Summer

The lengthening days and the anticipation of sunny weather are part of what makes May special, but in rural parts there are more subtle triggers that stir a deeper-rooted happiness that is somehow extracted from the locked chest of childhood.

I’m talking about the cuckoo’s call coming from somewhere across the fields. That clear, spoken pair of syllables cuck koo that sounds prehistoric, beautiful, and somehow like a personal call to you. The smell of wild garlic from the woods outside Mount Charles and the coconut scent of the furze when at last the sun is warm enough to raise it.

Meanwhile the mountains are predominately brown right now with this late spring. But within two weeks the green explosion will have taken place and the passage of clouds will be as dramatic on their flanks as it is in the skies above Barnesmore. Vacillating, bottle green, gliding along the hectares of unfurling bracken, they will be the flowing current that is the Donegal hills in Summer-time.

 

The Early Mornings of the Early Days of Parenthood

I've just discovered this poem from years ago.

Roaring.

 

Every morning

I balloon out of bed,

bank around the corners

into the other room

and rant.

 

 

Silence.

 

Rant bank balloon

morning

and

 

Roaring.

 

Every morning

I balloon out of bed,

bank around the corners

into the other room

and rant.

 

Silence.

 

Rant bank balloon

morning

and

 

 

for a smartish type,

I'm a slowish learner.

The world breaks, people disperse

in ant-burst fashion.

A piano-maker brimful of strings,                     hammers

            and physics             introduced me to his cities. 

There is no space,

one chaos is not like another.

RS Thomas reading The Bright Field

Accessible, moving, spiritual, relevant, profound are very complimentary words when applied to poetry. All of them apply to the poetry of the great Welsh poet RS Thomas. The Bright Field is a beautiful poem, his own reading of it enhances the beauty. 

Read it loud, a verbal upper

There is no poetry to match Whitman’s for exultation; he sings a body electric. Like a river in spate, there is an awesome energy in the poetry. Go to a quiet room, read it out loud, it's a verbal upper.  

 

One of the essential reads in all poetry, the poems from Whitman's " Leaves of Grass" can be got at http://www.bartleby.com/142/index2.html

 

 

from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" 

 1

 

 I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,

 And what I assume you shall assume,

 For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 

 I loafe and invite my soul,

 I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

 

 My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil,

 this air, 

 Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and

 their parents the same,

 I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

 Hoping to cease not till death. 

 Creeds and schools in abeyance,

 Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never

 forgotten,

 I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

 Nature without check with original energy. 

 2 

 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are

 crowded with perfumes,

 I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,

 The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. 

 The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the

 distillation, it is odorless,

 It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

 I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

 I am mad for it to be in contact with me. 

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread,

crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of   blood and air through my lungs,

The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of the wind,

 A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,

 The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,

 The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,

 The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. 

 

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are      millions of suns left,) 

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

 You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

 You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

 

3

 

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed
of life.

To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is
not my soul.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while
they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man
hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be
less familiar than the rest.

I am satisfied — I see, dance, laugh, sing;
As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side
through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day
with stealthy tread,
Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the
house with their plenty,
Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream
at my eyes,
That they turn from gazing after and down the road,
And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent,
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and
which is ahead?

 

 

 

Something Beautiful for May

Nice to get the English lyrics to one of the most beautiful songs, Cucurrucucu Paloma sung by Caetano Veloso.

"What will these stones ever know, little dove, of love?"

Playing Poetry

I nearly missed it. Elaine asked me to send her this link as an example for her students of poetry in everyday life. And sure enough, it is poetry in everyday life except it's not exactly everyday life, as you'll see.

Ray Hudson who knows a thing or two about hyperbole, inspired by Messi's brilliance, surpasses his previous best with this hilarious outburst last night.

Breathing

Now my father's life

is breathing.

Heavy work. 

He has already slipped away

to be alone

while we outside

mark every breath

like lap timers.

 

Now come the spaces:

a breath

is an isolated thing. 

Finally one breath

arrives alone. 

I feel a soul has left,

 

but just then

I see, so clearly,

it was hope

that slipped out of the room.

 

(from Sunfire)

A fundamental question

Jesus, don’t you remember thorns,  

flails and blood,

taunts,

fear,

betrayal,

the weight of wood,

thirst and nails,

the jolt of your cross into the earth? 

Lord, why is it still this way?

Two poems from Turn Your Head

These two poems are from Tuol Sleng Still, a series of poems relating to the death camp, Tuol Sleng, run by the Khmer Rouge in Phnomh Penh during the seventies. Still is for the photographs taken of inmates before and after their deaths (infants and youngsters included) and it's for 'now',our tacit acceptance of torture and death that seems undimmed no matter how civilised we imagine ourselves to be.

And my child? 
He sleeps with barely more than birth’s darkness in his head.
                
I watch his famine coming as surely as a train;
but make no mistake, if you see fear, it is fear of the void
at the centre of my child’s screams for food.
 
All else is contempt for men who cultivate dreams
where his will never grow.


                                **********

Looking away from the camera, I see
two soldiers hacking a prisoner’s legs
till he’s on his knees; the next is waiting
for his shins to explode into pain.
 
Ten-year olds screaming instructions,
angel-faces with AK-47’s;
childhoods manured in hatred
leaning against our horizon.

In twelve hours I've seen so much
I'm staring through it.
A lifetime scratches down that glass;
my mind is overrun with atrocities.
          

Sign at London Tube Station

I think I've mentioned it before: many years ago a woman dropped dead

 

immediately in front of me, walking down Oxford Street. She looked like a

 

countrywoman up for the day, formal looking, standing for a photograph

 

with pink coat and handbag; only she was horizontal.

 

The same Summer I came upon this sign:

 

           A male person jumped

            in front of a train

            last Wednesday evening

            around 7.00 pm. Information

            please at tube station.

 

Why are these still in my head, these two deaths?

 

I suppose it’s the tragedy of cities; two colossal events that are nothing

 

among the city’s millions.

InRathmines Information Day

Rathmines Community Clubs n Soc's Information Day has been re-named the InRathmines Information Day and will take place on April 27th, 12 noon - 5pm in the Swan Centre.

Organizations, clubs, societies and volunteering bodies active in the area will be on hand to give information about their activities and services, and enrol new members or volunteers. With live entertainment also on the programme, it's definitely worth a visit.

InRathmines is the brand name for a number of new sites including blog, facebook, twitter and website which set out to support all that's moving and stirring in Rathmines. Check out https://www.facebook.com/InRathmines https://twitter.com/InRathmines and the blog http://inrathmines.ie/?page_id=46 which has a number of interesting articles on people with Rathmines associations including articles on Rex Ingram, Francis Sheehy Skeffington and an interview with comedian Kevin McAleer.

Near Achill Sound

 

 

I remember an old man

with pipe and stick,

sitting on a kitchen chair

beside a rick of turf

in a field

before his house,

mountains in the background.

 

It was a Summer’s day;

a tress of smoke

rose from his pipe

into a cloudless sky.

 

That was a long time ago.

 

When democracy isn't

I have been around long enough to recognize obfuscation, disingenuousness and hollowness in the speeches and pronouncements of almost all our leading politicians. Long enough to recognize the trademark complacency, arrogance and condescension. And long enough to see how the exercise of party politics polishes off the edges that once promised something fresh or different.  

It appears that we are stuck with the system, but do we have to be stuck with the same parties? Where do you turn when you run out of choices?

 It’s just musical chairs isn’t it. The recent rise (from the ashes) of Fianna Fail is a case in point. This is the party that wedged us into today’s predicament through mismanagement, with leaders who lined their own pockets and who, through carefully honed “common touch”, betrayed their own roots. 

The Labour Party, laughably misnamed now, got it in the neck at the recent by-election; they are now almost more Fine Gael than Fine Gael themselves. (By the by, I heard Pat Rabbitte recently say in relation to another jurisdiction on how politicians might, as a matter of course, be less than honest in the lead up to an election; he and the interviewer missed the irony). But we’ve seen them rise and fall before. 

Fine Gael: Fianna Fail without a sense of humour; I’ve seen all the signs of smugness and arrogance in this government. Their very choice of ministers delared they were not interested in a new approach.  As for Sinn Féin, they are distrusted by too many voters to be a viable alternative for a while to come. 

But surely there is a big enough number of  TDs between all these parties who, sharing the interests of the people, would leave these broken organisations to found a party big enough and principled enough to provide a worthy, viable choice for the Irish electorate?