Writer's Block

i.e. the block on which a writer's head is severed.

Writer’s block

 

Nothing lands on this plain;

nothing moves

but its seeping emptiness.

 

Goggled pilot

high above

this snow-gagged wilderness,

 

loop or spin,

I leave no shadow;

the paper grins.

At Sartre's Funeral

This poem has little to do with Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, but the image of her sitting in a chair above  his grave got me started. I didn't see a photograph, so it was easier to envisage her as, almost, sitting by her hearth.

It is one of a number of poems that would not have been written if I had seen the image as it actually was. I wrote a number of poems on the subject of the felos in Galician carnaval (published in a chap-book, Felos aínda serra, by Amastra-N-Gallar, 2004; see link in side panel); I saw the images in black and white; had I seen  the many photographs which were in colour I would not have been able to write them.

They Gave Me A Chair.

 

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, was 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.

Another Perversion

Man-made

 

 

One shot

and the lights go out

down the street,

through the town, country,

world;

all that fits so easily inside a head. 

 

Now,

tipped slightly upward

in a hardened glob of brain tissue,

a beautifully sculpted,

aerodynamically perfect,

bright, shiny bullet.

Trap

I can't remember the circumstances in which this poem was written, and that's probably a  good thing.

 

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.

Where they lived

 

 

 

 

I’m always tempted to stop at derelict houses, old ruins, etc., sites where past generations have left their mark. There’s a particular atmosphere, a poignancy. In their state of aging or decay, they suggest sadness’s, hardships.  The tiny rooms, the (often) miserably poor land, potato ridges still outlined in a nearby field, a fuchsia in full bloom.

I hope to find something more than just the gable or bare walls, something that will transmit a stronger sense of the people that lived there. A surviving hearth, the lintel over the window, over the door, the details that bring some personality to the remains.

The other day I came upon the ruins of an old cottage at the top of a valley in the Bluestacks in Donegal. What a hard place it must have been in deep Winter; now its walls half gone, but its extent and layout still very clear. In a recess in the gable, there was a stone clearly shaped for some function; was it a pestle, or a weight?

It is so rare to find anything but bare walls scoured by the weather. I thought of holding onto it, but, much more than any museum exhibit, it was where it belonged; I left it. 

 

No People

The hunch-doubled thorns,

ingrown pantries

dung-puddled;

the moss-stone walls

tumble-gapped.

 

The nettle-cracked doorway,

lintel-fallen

byre-footed;

the cloud curtained windows

elder-berried. 

 

The stone-sheltered air

bumbled still,

ruin-reverent;

the submerged garden ridges

dumb-founded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following Human Disasters

The barbarity of war is one thing, a less obvious barbarity comes next. I find it difficult to decide how I feel about media reportage of human tragedies, but I follow it, sometimes avidly. Somewhere in that morass there is a level at which I am sharing in the inhumanity.

“At half six I turn on the television to see how the war’s coming on.

Tracers are arcing down on Baghdad;

the reporter keeps looking over his shoulder. 

Shoes off, I stretch out,

rest my feet on the coffee table.” 

And somewhere out there, the headlong mania of reporters and photographers looking for the money-shot.

Ed Behr recounting a scene among Belgian civilian refugees in Congo, 1960, “Into the middle of this crowd strode an unmistakably British TV reporter, leading his cameraman and sundry technicians like a  platoon commander through hostile territory. At interval he paused and shouted, in a stentorian but genteel BBC voice, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?” Ed Behr, Anyone here been raped and speaks English? 1981

 A Brief Note on an Imminent Famine. 

Everyone here will starve:

each bone will be a stripe,

each hand a bowl,

each leg a stick.

Then there'll be the gluttony

of cameras:

our threadbare skin

will be devoured,

our eyes exported

shining like pickles.

 

On The Beach

When, at the end of the beach, I turned

to face that gleaming scimitar of strand,

the filigreed waves  racing to land,

the geode patterns beneath my feet,

the scythe of 12 oyster catchers close-by,

their chevron markings perfect in that light,

I felt, suddenly, the glory of creation.

 

And, as I walked, I felt the completeness of my belonging,

and my impermanence, like the scarves of sand blowing

ahead of the wind, and not at all sad for that;

and seeing too that beliefs are transitory,

that the earth will swallow all and shine on

when all else has run its course.

Céilí and Trad at Canalaphonic, 8th and 9th May

Canalaphonic is  going to feature a huge range of music from jazz to trad to whatever. Pubs from the Bernard Shaw and the Barge out to Mother Reilly's in Upper Rathmines will be hopping on May 8th and 9th.

The stage at Rathmines Plaza (at Rathmines Leisure) will be the focus for trad lovers on Sat afternoon. The street céilí starts at 4. But before that,  there's 2 hours of music featuring Eleanor Shanley, Mike Hanrahan, Paul Kelly, Daoirí Farrell, the Dorians and the Ceoltóir Traditional Group BCFE.



Eleanor Shanley

 

Here's the trad line-up for the weekend, and it's all free.

At Rathmines Plaza:

2.00-2.15       Ceoltóir Traditional Group BCFE

2.15- 3.00      Eleanor Shanley, Paul Kelly, Mike Hanrahan

3.00- 3.45      Daoiri Farrell                                               

3.45-4.00       The Dorians 

4.00-5.00        Street Ceilí with Shay Mc Govern and music by Ceoltóir Traditional Group BCFE 

 pub sessions are

9.30 pm Fri. 8^th May Sugán in Grace’s

9.30 pm Fri 8^th   May   Trad Rocks in Slattery’s

9.30 pm Sat 9^th May  Arís Arún in Grace’s

9.30 pm Sat 9th May   Trad Rocks in Slattery’s

 

"Death the leveller"

Poem Beside Your Hospital Bed.                                               

 

Your face,

that I loved,

has changed so completely

that I already know

our time is gone.

 

And as dying

like a sandstorm

rearranges your features,

I am useless;

a cripple of words.

 

So if the winds in your head

will carry the smallest breath

of what I am saying, father:

let it be that

my proud years are tatters here;

I love you.

Scarecrows

We are two scarecrows: rags and string;

what the rain softens the wind picks clean.

 

We are two scarecrows: sticks and straw;

crows fly out from underneath our jackets.

 

We are two scarecrows: nails and wire;

each day drowning as the corn grows higher.

 

We are two scarecrows: sacks and hay;

nodding toward eternity, we tip toward clay.

The ballad of a life he lived too long

 

 

We found a pool of sphagnum

glowing in a shaft of sunlight:

an emerald pinned

to the forest's heart.

 

She stepped onto the moss;

it oozed around her feet;

she danced; her mauve apron dress,

her carnival eyes.

 

She was humming,

sending her semi-song to me,

and as the sun held her dazzling,

I was in darkness, standing aside.              

 

I saw how the light loved her hair,

fingered its goldness

while she was spinning down;

and the moss was at her knees.                   

 

She was laughing,

she was always laughing,

but I could see the cold bursting

spring growth in her face.

 

And then her hair was spreading out,

the green carpet creeping up to her neck;

she, her young face

on the floor of the forest.

 

Later, when the sun had left,

left the forest to the circuit-making spiders and me;

still standing by the sphagnum pool

I was repeating " good-bye, good-bye, good-bye".

The Irish Soldier in World War One

On the 9^th December 1916, Thomas Kettle was killed at the battle of the Somme in Belgium at the age of 36. He was extraordinarily gifted, here’s a piece from The Work of T.M. Kettle, published by Robert  Lynd in 1919:

To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common enough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men who have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished genius as Lieutenant T. M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of those men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of letters and the gift of politics : he was a mathematician, an economist, a barrister, and a philosopher : he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar : as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze of adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going about as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as the leading Irish statesman of his day.  (from  XXIII. ‘The Work of T.M. Kettle’ in ‘Old and New Masters’, Robert Lynd, 1919)

A  quotation included in this article gives a sense of Kettle’s eloquence:  Meditating on life as " a sustained good-bye," he writes : Life is a cheap table d'hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

Kettle, though a staunch and very active Irish nationalist, (member of the Irish Volunteers and the United Irish League, Irish Parliamentary Party MP), still found it incumbent on him to join the British forces:

For my part, I am fighting for Ireland. Against what are we fighting? The philosophy to which modern Germany has committed herself can be adequately described only as the gospel of the devil. It is a creed in which domination is the one dogma and cruelty the one sacrament.

This quotation encapsulates in just three lines why it is right that, at last, we are giving honour to the patriotism of so many Irishmen who died under a British flag in World War 1.

This view and the spirit in which he fought is beautifully caught his poem To My Daughter Betty, The Gift  Of God

 To My Daughter Betty, The Gift Of God

 In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

To beauty proud as was your Mother’s prime.

In that desired, delayed, incredible time,

You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,

And the dear heart that was your baby throne,

To die with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme

And reason: some will call the thing sublime,

And some decry it in a knowing tone.

So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream, born in a herdsmen shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.  

 

.

 

 

Rathmine's New Festival, Canalaphonic

 

Canalaphonic on May 8th and 9th will be mainly focussed on Portobello Harbour where a flotilla of barges and boats will be moored overnight on Saturday 9th. Cue lights, action: music of all sorts in venues all around Rathmines, music on the water and on the street including an open-air trad session and céilí on Rathmines Square, lots of children's events,  trips up the canal to Harold's Cross where, coincidently, another festival is taking place that weekend.

Random small bits

Your Crying

 

Your crying:

The silver streams

Of your eyes,

The radiant red cheeks,

The choking on words,

The gullish. 

Somehow

I think of a voice

Curling up

From inside a hollow oak.

…………………………………………………………..…………………………….

 

We were a fire;

only our sparks

had direction.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, be-suited and slim,

weight he lost dying. 

 

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely

but when I touched his face,

it wasn’t him at all.

……………………………………………………………………………..…..........………

Seeing through this patterned pane

your face,

whole but distorted

like our love.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Beacon lights' eccentric twitches

electrocute the night;

a lighthouse beam swimming round

swallows them in flight.

 

………………………………………………………………………………........…………….

In The Park

 

I met an old man

with seawater eyes

 

sweeping together

the leaves of his life;          

 

into a sack

went each golden one.