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?

Cycle of Life

I hadn't realised till working on Above Ground Below Ground how the old myths - Gods,Godesses,changelings,magic,etc - were the ancient take on science. In particular the rivalries between some of the deities represent natural cycles and indeed recycling. Moreover, that they through being linked with mores, customs and laws made some of the ecological imperatives (that we are only now appreciating and grappling with) sacred.

The piper plays jigs and hornpipes,
the trees sway;
when the piper stops
the trees remain suspended
in contours around themselves.

Beneath the earth
the grovelling roots
fingering soil grains,
thriving on death,
know nothing of the dance.

Long ago, the piper decreed
that trees become wheels,
turning darkness to light,
resurrecting the dead,
making circles of time.

A sensational trip over Ireland

Watch full screen.

When the bullshit's done

In sickness there was only you 

light as a feather,

relieved of the weight

of position and pride;

neither bluff nor brashness

nor the strength

to be more than your dying self.

A Gathering of Famous People with Irish Roots

Tonight I decided to list famous people who have Irish roots, (it being the Irish time of year). I got tired of it quickly but had gone too far to stop. I did curtail it though, which wasn’t easy; there’s an awful lot of famous names that belong on this list. The Irish went in for big Catholic families and it shows; and truth is: politics, cinema, music, crime, literature would have been very different without them. 

I don’t expect anyone to read all these; just cast your eyes around and you’ll get the jist. Of course, the Irish family names often make the Irish connection obvious, but sometimes you're not thinking. 
  

So, in no order at all, Irish English,  Irish Scottish, Irish French, Irish American, Irish Austrailian,Irish Canadian: 

Iris Murdoch, Charles Laughton, Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Georgia O’Keeffe, Johnny Depp, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert de Niro, Mohammed Ali,  Christina Aguilera, Drew Barrymore, Elvis Costello, Chuck Norris, Harrison Ford, Judy Garland, Woodrow Wilson, Kurt Cobain, Edgar Allen Poe, Errol Flynn, Joseph McCarthy, Sean Penn, Robert Redford, Ben Stiller, Walt Disney, Alicia Keys, Cheryl Cole, Isadora Duncan,  Andrew Jackson, Mandy Moore, Billy the Kid, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Bill Murray,  Jennifer Connelly, Paul McCartney, Tyrone Power, John F Kennedy and brothers of course, Mia Farrow,  Ann Hathaway, Greer Garson, Richard Nixon,  Michael Moore, Alfred Hitchcock, Ned Kelly,  Ant and Dec, Tori Amos, Robert Downey Jnr, Raymond Chandler, Bing Crosby, John Travolta, Ernest Shackleton, Bo Derek, Mickey Rourke, Jack Dempsey, Tom Keneally,  Jeremy Irons, Jules Holland, Rosemary Clooney, Henry Ford, Gregory Peck, Theodore Roosevelt, Conan O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bronte sisters, Danny Boyle, Henry James, John Huston, John Barry (composer), Rex Ingram, Boy George, Dusty Springfield,  Lance Armstrong, James Hennessy (cognac), Britney Spears, Jeanne Moreau, Mel Gibson,  John Berryman, Tom Clancy, Gene Kelly, Bill Clinton, Sean Connery, Macaulay Culkin, Jimmy Carter, Ulysses S  Grant, Rihanna, Wayne Rooney, John Daly, F Scott Fitgerald, Roger McGough, Brian Mulroney, Angela Lansbury, Eugene O’Neill, Kathy Bates,  John McEnroe, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Costner, Sharon Osbourne, Mickey Spillane, Frank O’Hara, Grace Kelly, Billy Connolly, James Cagney, Morrissey, Kylie Minogue,  John Wayne, Ralph Fiennes, Spencer Tracy, Harry S Truman, John Barry (navy), Ed Sullivan, Ronald Reagan, Mark Wahlberg, Sidney Nolan,  Tim Buckley, Charlie Sheen, Jeff Buckley, Elvis Presley, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, Richard J Daley, Ben Hogan, Alan Rickman, Barrack Obama, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, George Clooney, John Cusack, Peter Kay, Susan Sarandon, astronaut Michael Collins, Ben Affleck, George W Bush, George Harrison,  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Anthony Quinn, Minnie Driver, Michael Gambon, Eddie Murphy, Marlon Brando.

Yeah, I know; it looks like I don't have much to be doing. Some nights.........................

Different Time, Different Attitudes

In his book, Woodbrook, published in 1974, David Thomson writes of his memory of Douglas Hyde, then President of Ireland who used to be a frequent visitor in Lord de Freyne’s house in Frenchpark, Co Roscommon.

Thomson regrets that, on meeting him there, he did not listen more intently to the president whose conversation could have taught him more about Ireland than anyone else's; but the following passage is interesting, if only for the fact that if this was reported today the president would be a source of considerable scrutiny and serious doubt.

“And so it happens that my only memory of this great man is ludicrous………..It is of a game he played with the girls on all fours in the drawing room. He was over eighty but had no difficulty in getting down on to his hands and knees and as soon as they were ranged opposite him on theirs he would hold a bar of chocolate between his teeth like a cigar and they would crawl towards him and bite  off as much as they dared. It was somewhat messy because he had a bushy white moustache that drooped over the chocolate and his lower lip...”

On a slightly different note, I wonder if he ever used the elegant wash-stand that came from that house and is now my hall-table.

from Felos ainda serra

included in the chapbook published in Galicia in 2005

 

Go to bed, Michael,

or the monsters will come.

Say your prayers,

build yourself a wall.

Pull the blankets up

over your eyes.

Be silent down your burrow,

the night sky is stirring.

Go to sleep, Michael,

they will not disturb the dead.

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

“There is an owl in my head”

said Joseph. “I am wise,

wisest of all creatures”.

“There is a tiger in my head”

said Paul. “I am  fierce,

all creatures fear me”.

“A stag in mine”

said Thomas. “ I am majestic,

admired by all”.

“My head is empty”

said Jim. “ a space

for all creatures to come and go.”