See and Hear Great Poets Online

Wonderful to be able to hear Alfred Tennyson reading from “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in the Historic Readings section of The Poetry Archive website. He died in 1892. And Robert Browning who died in 1889. Others audio clips include Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, RS Thomas, Patrick Kavanagh, Yeats Pound, Stevie Smith, Sitwell, TS Eliot and many more. Check out the following pages:

Alfred Tennyson http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1569
Robert Browning http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1545
Sylvia Plath http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7083
Siegfried Sassoon http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1561

And, of course, YouTube is a treasure trove. Here are some pages to start: Ginsberg reading his best, Philip Larkin and Betjeman and Jenny Joseph not old enough yet to be wearing purple.

Philip Larkin interviewed by Betjeman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTdDS05x6d0
Seamus Heaney reading Digging http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIzJgbNANzk
Ginsberg reading Howl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50
TS Eliot reading Prufrock http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhiCMAG658M
Thomas Kinsella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l4PETJ5Z_Q
Anna Akhmatova http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htW5XzUD24k&feature=related
Jenny Joseph reading Warning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cACbzanitg




This last video’s closing banner "killed by ignorance" prompts me to post my own poem from Sunfire which carries a similar message.

Reflecting with Goya.

Of course not;
of course no one that ever cracked open a head
has seen a symphony pour out.

No executioner has seen the flow of an amber fireside
with its intimate and tangling caresses
drain from the split skulls of lovers

nor have soldiers who shoot dark holes
seen rafts of memories spilling, carrying the children,
the birthdays, the orchards, the dances.

When they shot the poet Lorca,
the bullets sailed in a universe; yet when the blood spurted,
it was only blood to them.

The Disaster of War

I get a lot of inspiration from photographs, particularly those that relate to human tragedies; and of these none have moved me more than Don McCullin’s work.
This photograph exemplifies my point. This soldier: his pockets pilfered, a trail of personnel items strewn on the ground. A family destroyed, their photographs scattered; the ruination of lives unimportant, the girl in the photograph just a child. All that is important to the assailants: pilfered. There is no glory in war.



Soldier


Shot crossing a wasteground;
they left him,
pockets pilfered,
staring beyond all wars;

a trail of photographs
and letters running from him
like a congealed flow
of memories.

Magical Art

Magical Art

I think the very best the arts can do is to lift us out of the mundane and into the wonderful. Too often I leave a cinema feeling that I been beaten over the head. No matter what the medium, when art lifts us above ourselves it reaches its finest: whether that be in soaring voices, breath-taking cinematography, beautiful words or exquisite painting. Obvious names come to mind: Mozart, Fellini, Michelangelo, Yeats, Shakespeare, Bosch, Leonardo, Bach.

But no need to be quite so classical, so grand: for me Pink Floyd, Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway. Sometimes glimpses of same are stumbled on: that’s how I felt when I first stumbled on Martin Gale’s work.

I maybe a bit behind, but I’ve just stumbled on the work of Ulla Schildt. Originally from Finland but now residing, I believe, in Oslo; she is a graduate of Dublin Institute of Technology. My discovery is in the exhibition Flow, a joint exhibition of art works from the OPW State art collection and the collection of the Department of Finance and Personnel, Northern Ireland, currently on view in the Pearse Museum in Dublin.

The image in question is Water World: a spectacular vision of lush exotic jungle flora (almost cinematic); a child stands gazing at it in some botanical garden. The wonder of the exhibition heightened by the mesmerized child draws the viewer right back to the days of childhood wonderment.

So I found some more of her works on line in which she time and again uses a transfixed child to convey to us the magic of some display of nature.Even in the tiny format employed on the website below, viewers will be interested in the exhibits on display,enchanted by the wonder of the viewing children and themselves transported back to their own childhoods by the magical displays. The images are moving and beautiful.

Visit http://www.foto.no/cgi-bin/articles/articleView.cgi?articleId=39992 and http://www.flickr.com/photos/78025134@N00/2834982711/in/photostream/
to see some examples of her work.

Love Poem

Watching Films In Your Face

I am watching the film in your face:
your enjoyment crinkling
the corners of your eyes,
teeth catching lower lip,
blood draining from the pressure,
draining back as soon.

Furrows on your forehead,
I am smiling at your absorption,
want to smooth them with my thumb
but you catch me looking
so I turn back to the screen
till your face is mine again.

The words on my lips
remain unsaid. A time may come
when, not having words,
I will wish I had spoken; a time
when love being tested, I could say
I used to watch films in your face.

Poetry makes Beautiful Sound

I suspect "I love you" sounds beautiful in any language when it is whispered by a lover with real passion and feeling. I imagine the phrase transcends language.

Beautiful poetry read with passion and true feeling should be toe-curling,so often isn't; it should hit home like Maria Callas singing Casta diva.


Here is Khalil Gibran on love from The Prophet; the voice may be a bit sugary but you don't need to understand a single word of the portugese version below to know that the poetry is beautiful.


When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the wind lays waste the garden.

For, just as love crowns you
so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth
so is he for your fall.
Even as he ascends to your height
and caresses your tenderest branches
that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots
and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are malleable;
Then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread
for God's sacred feast.

The UK and US have financed Central African Wars

This KPFA Radio News report(21/3/2010)reports the UK and US financing of Central African wars,approx 8 million deaths.That's roughly equal to a separate 9/11 death toll for each person that died in the 9/11 atrocity.

There is a lot of material online about the funding of the war in the Congo. This is particularly the case this year; it relates to the sale of minerals (conflict minerals) by the militias to the big electronics manufacturers, the proceeds being used to fund their warfare.To the extent that we all use these electronics products everyday, we are all complicit.It also concerns the signing by President Obama, last July, into law a measure that requires corporations to disclose publicly what they are doing to ensure that their products don't contain these minerals.

Read more: http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2010/July/20100722185137su0.4561535.html&distid=ucs#ixzz18axaAP1M

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20090402/ai_n31495938/

http://news.scotsman.com/democraticrepublicofcongo/Congo-Mineral-sourcing-move-to.6662060.jp

http://this.org/blog/2010/08/06/conflict-minerals-congo-canada/

http://www.foreignpolicydigest.org/Africa/October-2010/congos-conflict-minerals-us-legislation-and-impacts-on-the-ground.html



Why did it take so long to take the legislation step? Economic reasons.

Two Favorite Cristmas Poems

Patrick Kavanagh's Christmas Childhood, so accurate, so evocative of my own christmas childhood: the frost on the north side of a garden ridge, the tracks of cattle frozen solid around the water barrels, and I've seen the three kings in the moonlight of a christmas night.

This is a stunningly accurate evocation of the magic of christmas for a child in rural Ireland. Belief made apparations possible, and christmas with it's wonderful imagery made it the hide tide mark of a child's imagination.

A Christmas Childhood
One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin* bushes rode across
The horizon — The Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
'Can't he make it talk'—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade—
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.


Jane Marchant catches the warmth of christmas in the warmth of a family kitchen; this is so much of the pleasure of the day, and most of the reason people reminisce fondly at christmas time.

The Christmas Thing
My grandmother sat
On Christmas morning
Mending overalls.
A tall tree glittered,
A hen was roasting,
And the room was merry
With dolls and balls,
So why was she mending
Overalls?
The air is magic
On Christmas morning
And it isn't a time
For doing chores.
We had given her
A brooch that glittered
After anxious searchings
Of ten cent stores
So why was she working
At everyday chores?
I didn't know then
But I learned much later
That Christmas magic
Goes through and through
The fabric of living
Love, threading her needle,
Made mending
The Christmas-thing to do.

Flying through Ireland

I came across these two videos on Youtube. The first, posted by FaoleannOBradaigh, shows footage of Ireland from the air; it is absolutely gorgeous and in places quite exhilarating. I particularly enjoyed flying alongside the escarpment at Ben Bulben and flying low over the road that skirts the Burren in North Clare. It’s a great advert for scenic Ireland.

The second is a motorbike ride through parts of Donegal posted by IrishBikedotCom. The video is a promo for Irish Motorcycle Adventures and definitely succeeds in whetting the appetite for a bike tour through the county, (the music is great too).

Two very enjoyable sight-seeing videos; hold onto your hat.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a78RUocSN3Y

Remembering My Mother

December has sad memories for my family. Both my father and mother died in December; my mother five years ago. She was a very down to earth, practical woman completely devoid of any pretensions. Maybe that’s partly why I found it hard to write about her. However I was pleased with this short poem; I think it captures the sort of person that she was and the importance of home in her life.

She was

Two cups of flour resourceful

Plumb-line straight

Three sides of a triangle logical

Rain-coat wise

Five woollen blankets caring.

Strange how the world turns

Strange how the world turns. Empty houses dotted the countryside in the twentieth century. Emigration hollowed out rural Ireland right up to the nineties. Old cottages in various stages of dilapidation were everywhere. Then came wealth and with it those houses were demolished and replaced, or they were renovated; the semi-ruins of previous decades became thin on the ground.

Now empty houses dot the country again. Half-built housing estates abandoned without even the melancholy beauty of having once been inhabited; ugly building sites on the peripheries of towns;ugly as rotten teeth.

Both situations happened because of the lack of money, but one marks an era that was tarnished by run-away excess, and frequently greed. These remains will, since they have no other redeeming factor, at least remind us of that.

This poem from Sunfire (Dedalus Press, 1998)was an attempt to catch the sadness of emigration and the aging of the resident population as I saw it in the seventies.

A Stranger In The Townland.


In Autumn the farmhouse
with the sun-folded field beneath its chin,
traps the daylight in its spectacles,
then flashes it away.

A swing hangs among the orchard's arthritic trees
without stirring;
without remembering
a frantic liveliness now reduced
to the occasional commotion of a falling fruit.

Once songs of apples filled the farmhouse;
but the children became photographs,
the dust settled on their frames
and soon Autumns were flying uncontrollably by.
Today, between its curiosities, a bluebottle drones.

Now that the conversation with the hillside
is ended, the farmhouse
with the sycamore stole
has become an eccentric;
a stranger in the townland.

It was the Sixties

There is suddenly a new feeling and, unlike the sixties, it's not coming here second hand; it's our very own Irish turning and my instinct is it's good. But for those old enough here is a taste of the sixties, Irish style.


It was the time of Afton and Albany,
Joe O’Neill’s band and the Adelaides,
hay forks sharing pub windows
with Daz and Persil; the Smithwicks sign
and the Harp sign, half-ones of Guinness.

It was a time of pipe-smoking
beneath naked bulbs and neon strips,
the priest in his cassock,
Hillman Hunters, Ford Corsairs,
Wilkinson Swords and Fruit Gums.

Of scarved heads at mass, berets,
the Messenger and the Far East,
dress makers and blacksmiths;
hollowed faces in the County Home,
yanks in the sitting room.

Length of Eternity

Studying Geology in U.C.G. eons ago (geologic time),I came across this wonderful evocation of eternity:

High up in the north, in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

(From The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem Van Loon)

I mention it because I really like it and secondly because elsewhere on the net this day is calculated, see http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~cds/articles/svithjod.html

Poems to do with Lovers, Loving and Loving no More

People change, time moves them along,their loves change like trees, like fires, like buildings.Most keep the narratives in their heads or poets "tell it slant". From Sunfire and Turn Your Head:


Visit


When I am sleeping
you come
softly over these stones;
I turn deeper.
You slip words into my ears,
liquid syllables,
sickles sliding down.

Night-time turns drunk;
longing for more,
your tongue to enwrap me;
I turn deeper.
You trickle down dreams;
our limbs braided,
we slip into one.

When you pass

cups miss mouths,
ladders slip,
buckets crash down,

cars veer,
cyclists swerve,
drunkards sober up,

poles and policemen collide,
business men miss kerbs,
schoolboys drool.

Me? I’m just your wing mirror,
enjoying the devastation
behind you.


-----------------

It's a certifiable moment
a punch-drunk second
a pulse's high tide.

A dog eats grass
a water drop shivers
a barrel fills to its brim
an apple falls
a body drifts
a face buckles
a lover screams.

At the tip of an orgasm
passion powders;
the creek turns to dust.

Fifteen Irises from my Black Humour to You.


The mallards go off like a shot gun;
each a storm of wings
and black as a keyhole.

The pond, empty now,
is gripped in a glacial sulk.

Fifteen irises from my black humour to you,
their shadows only;
the pond will part with no more.

Netherlands American Cemetery

I was going to write about the Margraten Cemetery after my visit two weeks ago. War is an abomination; but the sight of all those headstones, all those names, all buried in the beautiful green countryside at Margraten;seeing all that on a sunny Summer's day left only sadness and a confusion of thoughts in my head. What would the world be now if those soldiers,(8,032 buried there), had not died?

This inscription on a wall there is beautiful:

EACH FOR HIS OWN MEMORIAL
EARNED PRAISE THAT WILL NEVER DIE
AND WITH IT
THE GRANDEST OF ALL SEPULCHRES
NOT THAT IN WHICH
HIS MORTAL BONES ARE LAID
BUT A HOME
IN THE MINDS OF MEN

From The Netherlands

In the Netherlands for a few weeks. It's been warm, unusually warm, mid to late thirties. That's not a complaint. I've enjoyed it here; I've like the Dutch and the countryside is postcard perfect. And the cycling is a pleasure. But that's nothing to do with this post.



She Leaves.


She leaves
a country of mountain tops,
pencil points in nothing
and crosses on current arrows
to where the sun shines on a space.

Angels
look over the rails,
cheering ferries on the sea

of her worries;
for that is where she bobs,
among all the sparklets
on the sea-top.
And fears
scratch their fingernails
down the glass

she has left;
not left,
left, not left.