Into the earth they go, those lives barely more than dreams.
Nurtured, schooled, and delivered before the full flowering
of youth to the guns and bombs of wars spurred on by the
vainglorious who, beating the drums in the far distance, turn
on the tap of patriotic souls. And how they let it drip; oh, if it
had been a tap of water, it would’ve been mended long ago;
the pity is we don’t hear soldiers dying.
Portuguese singer/songwriter José 'Zeca' Alfonso at his best: Grandola vila morena, with its haunting accompaniment of marching feet is, even by the high standards of Portuguese music, extraordinarily stirring. Sometimes a song gives me the feeling that I must write, rare enough really, but when that sense lingers it is down to the strength of feeling the singer and song arouses, and this is definitely a case in point.
Grândola, brown town,
Land of fraternity;
It's the people who command
Inside you, oh city.
Inside you, oh city,
It's the people who command;
Land of fraternity,
Grândola, brown town.
On each corner there's a friend
In each face there's equality
Grândola, brown town,
Land of fraternity.
Land of fraternity
Grândola, brown town
In each face there's equality
It is the people who command
In the shadow of a holm oak
Which no longer knew its age
I swore as my companion,
your will, Grândola;
your will, Grândola,
I swore as my companion
In the shadow of a holm oak
Which no longer knew its age.
Daffodils are
yellow-brained aliens
standing one-legged
in the April snow.
Star-headed,
they gaze into the emptiness,
open-mouthed,
silent.
The waves make mountains;
they are as impassable as the Himalayas.
A life time is short;
I’m not going to take them on;
and that, somehow, seems a defeat;
a wide gaping failure;
as though the waves came ashore and found me
and declared to all and sundry that I am a coward.
Underside of a ripple moving through the water;
sleek and graceful.
Elegant too, sitting by the pool as though it was
the flowing water that shaped her.
And the pool, still in thoughtfulness, as I would be
if she stepped away.
The backs of my hands ancient:
aerial photo of mountain range,
parched landscape, countless miles.
My life, neither cuneiform nor hieroglyphic,
not hardship, but travelled;
travelled across that lonely landscape.
Oak-aged, Leonard’s voice.
Dancing in the early hours, turning
on the spools of his words;
arms pouring like wine downward,
filling her full with his lilt;
her eyes soft as the vowels he intoned;
her feet unsure, carefully stepping
on the cobbles of song;
singing it one beat behind
as though each word arrived one moment too late;
swaying,
the glass of wine in her hand
precarious
like a life on the verge of spilling.
Fiddle, flute, the Salamanca reel:
drops of rain slide into line
along the underside of a mossy rock
before falling in the unpredictable waves
that breaths play in the crevices
between the rocks
asking them to go: now, go now, go now.
Swallows on a wire striking up the reel,
fluff up as gusts, minute as golf balls,
lift their feathers so each flickering a different
daylight swoops off
as fingers darken the holes,
strings flash momentarily
and see, the music moving through the air.
A re-edited poem, I first posted it in 2018. The cloud was down, and the world was muffled by it. There was no wind, so the Atlantic, for all its colossal extent and ferocity was lapping onto the strand as gentle as a pond. There was so much that was grey around us, we seemed miniature, like we were walking in the sky.
But small as we were, we were there when the world around us seemed to have been erased; we felt more alive, not in the sense of being more active but our minds magnified. In a way it made me feel like a God.
Murvagh Grey Day
There’s so little difference between sea and cloud,
the whole scene might as well be upside down.
The bisectors of St John’s Point, a finger stretching
across the horizon, and Mullagmore, Adam to God,
reaching back. To the left, white clouds are hanging,
sheets from a bed, down the sides of Ben Bulben; to the
right the Bluestacks slumped beneath mosquito nets of rain.
Smokey light, filling the bay, lulling the world like ether;
the waves that raced across the ocean, surviving the fury
at Rosnowlagh, collapsing, now spent, onto the sand of
Murvagh beach, pooled with cloud we’re walking through,
you and I, silhouettes moving along the bottom edge
of this canvas, causing suddenly a tin of paint to spatter
upward: a bevy of oystercatchers taking to flight.
In the small hours, in the darkness, early March,
I hear the curlews out on the bog.
Night and bog are the same to them;
they stick their heads through that one black fabric,
declare themselves black stars pulsing, and then
gone; the universe left searching through its pockets.
The question was straight; the answer infuriating, a labyrinth of generalities. So it had to be asked again, the minister prevaricated again, so it had to be asked again.......
No light forthcoming; the minister wasn’t answering, wasn’t acknowledging that she wasn’t answering and was, seemingly, hoping nobody would notice.
Goddammit, stop talking! Same minister does it all the time. I can’t stand her. And no, this isn’t a sexist rant, she just happens to be the one this time, and my head is demanding I offer some resistance.
To my way of thinking, this is a clear insult; does the minister somehow think that she has mesmerised us with canny wordplay, that all of us out here in listener-land are nodding our heads like those dogs that nodded, years ago, in the back windows of cars; is she so arrogant that she believes that her evasive handling of the question makes a good enough answer for a dim-witted population.
Democracy doesn’t count for much in a fog of obfuscation and lies, yet we tolerate it every time we allow a politician to use filibustering tactics in an interview; to talk over or try to drown out an opposing argument; introduce red herrings e.g. maybe X was corrupt, but don’t forget forget how well Y was managed. If the supreme power of a state is invested in its people, it follows that they shouldn’t be stumbling around in darkness.
Whistle-blowers are victimised unmercifully in these systems for daring to throw light on nefarious practices. No matter that they selflessly expose themselves to this for the common good, no matter that they show levels of bravery that are admired in other circumstances; the prevailing darkness suited these politicians, and that’s the wholly all of it.
Nor do cults of personality support democracy, when all the available light is used to spotlight a chosen one. Here the message is, keep your eyes on me, follow me, I am your source of light. And, of course, a spotlight always deepens the shadow around it.
I don’t buy the notion of western democracy as it’s presented. Sure, it’s an improvement on most dictatorships, but it doesn’t confer the freedom it claims to; not as long as public information is purposely garbled and deceptive, nor as long as advertising campaigns funded by lobby groups with deep pockets and partisan views are allowable – advertising is not an open forum – or indeed while there are systems that are overwhelmingly two party driven, when we all know that it takes more than two colours to produce white light.
To say I am troubled by recent trends in politics would be to understate it. It seems to me that the further we have travelled from the pioneers that founded our states the more our politicians have become blowers of smoke. I am afraid that a generation of politicians cleverer than the current will turn smoke to tar, and light doesn’t penetrate tar.
A narrow stream of blood has collected
in a pool on the cracked pavement;
it has run from a hole in the belly of a young man;
he lies there drained of his life.
Tomorrow people will walk over this trace, hurrying;
for what is a bloodstain:
a drunkard’s fall, a late-night brawl,
a remnant of hideous nightlife that blundered into day?
The darkening blood-flow seems almost a mockery
of the life that sailed away along it;
and the dried stain its receipt:
who could be blamed for believing there must be more?
