Dubliner in Japan

466. Crossover

2012-02-10T09:02:00.000+09:00

My life is in your hands, she said,
and my first ignoble thought, forgive me,
was why was she saying this?

We’d only known each other three weeks
and she was a cute lovely girl and all that
but we hadn’t, umm, you know … done anything?

My father comes from the old country, she said,
and he is so strict. My mother, she is worse!
My older brothers, Daoad and Amir,
they always always beat up my boyfriends
and I hate them! But with you I feel good.

Me, I wasn’t feeling ecstatic at this news,
for I had had a glimpse of Daoad and Amir,
those hairy gorillas, and could only imagine
what the father was like. Never mind the mother.

Ehh, do you have any sisters, says I, to move
this dreadful family saga along. Oh, she dead.
She betrayed my cousin so my uncle kill her.

Oh, really?
Yah, my father he must apologise.
Anyway, you kiss me now?

My lips for some reason ran dry,
some temporary saliva failing, and I
took a rather quick look around …

O God! Is that Daoad (or Amir) outside
looking in the window? No, a shadow.
I’m starting to have feelings about shadows.

Look, Zaynab, I really like you a lot …
I know. I am a treasure. Many boys want me.
But you, you don’t only want my body,
you love my mind. I like that in you.

Ah, of course. To be sure.

I like you, you are Irish boy, Irish boys
are strong and brave, good lovers.
I dart a glance again at the window.

O God, that’s him!
doubt without a Daoud,
no, I mean … emm, I need to visit the gents!

Of course, my dear. Don’t be long.
Where is the back door? Unseen by me,
Amir arrives, smiles at his sister,
and picks up my half-finished pint of beer.

Gone then, is he? O like a puff of wind.

465. The Facebook Poem

2012-02-08T12:13:00.002+09:00

( aka Cellphone Sally)

Perhaps a coupla hundred contacts
on Facebook, then, as if you could tell
who or what the hell. Might know, see,
37 of these people, but as for the rest,
they pop up as a constant surprise.
Could be for the best, this ebb and flow,
day to day before your eyes, as through
anew this jagged world you come and go:
try not to be cruel, try to be kind!
Wannabe friends? Oh, I don't mind.
So ... that's how you collect all these
stunningly gorgeous Japanese women
(well, according to their own photographs)
who ding on you but don't have to meet you??
Telecomputers become their social tool
which for them is ... so exactly cool,
it tickles their feminine mystique:
don't touch, don't see, don't speak!
Look, look at them on the trains and buses
tap-tap-tapping with polished nails,
having a great time altogether! I think
if smartphones had a disposable stiff extension
for discreet use, say, in a shopping mall
(come on Samsung, come on Apple!)
there'd be no further need for marriage,
no further need for lads at all.

464. Moon Faraway Person Thinking

2012-01-21T14:41:00.001+09:00

Looking at the Moon and Thinking of One Far Away

望月懷遠

海上生明月，天涯共此時。
情人怨遙夜，竟夕起相思。
滅燭憐光滿，披衣覺露滋。
不堪盈手贈，還寢夢佳期。

Over the sea the moon
brightens heaven, brings
to separated hearts
thoughts in the night.

It is no darker
though I blow out my candle.
It is no warmer
though I put on my coat.

So I leave my message
with the moon,
and I go to my bed
hoping for dreams.

-- 張九齡 Zhang Jiuling
http://en.wikipedia....i/Zhang_Jiuling

Translator's note: I hope your computer is able to read and transmit the Chinese characters of the original poem, if for no other reason than that they are so concise and elegant! A difficulty arises in all translations from the Chinese (or Japanese) in that the brevity and directness of the style causes all kinds of technical problems in attempts to reproduce the content in English while adhering to the driving spirit of the poem. The mental worlds surrounding our varied languages and ways of thinking are different, of course, and never more so than when dealing with faraway cultures. Although this poem was composed more than a thousand years ago it is as fresh as the day it was written! You will notice there are three 4-line stanzas in the translation whereas the original is composed of 4 separate stanzas made up by each horizontal line divided into two sections of five Chinese characters apiece. The first stanza of the translation actually combines the first two stanzas of the original, i.e the first half of the poem. This was done on purpose by me in order to maintain the velocity as well as the content of the poem ... and if you can understand that, welcome to the world of translation!

463. Rewrites

2012-01-17T09:04:00.002+09:00

The road was a ribbon of moonlight across the purple moor
when the highwayman came riding, riding up to my front door.
Sirrah, raged he, in tones of dudgeon and high incense:
no more delay, I pray, please pay for your TV license!

***

Come pensive nun, devout and pure,
sober, steadfast and demure.
Let's go out and have some fun:
we'll dance the fandango and the tango,
and I'll have you home by half past one.

***

There is sweet music here which softer lies
thn tired eyelids upon tired eyes;
when it gets too much I make it stop
and switch my iPod to hip hop.

***

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
with ulullating cries they surrounded my car,
and sold me five rugs and a bug in a jar.

***

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I think of fine ladies I have caught
and hope the latest won't be the last.

***

I will arise now and go to Inisfree,
and a cabin I will build there of clay and wattles made;
nine whiskey stills shall I have there, all made just for me,
smoke dope in a purple glow, then doze off in the shade.

***
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
And I remember how he said to me,
you can't take pleasure with you,
you must take your pleasures now,
with girls brought in from Vegas
and gamblers from Macau.

***

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
This much is surely plain.
Half-serious, half glitter and tinsella,
A man is in fact a peninsula.

462. Sussex

2012-01-15T09:23:00.001+09:00

Down the village street she goes,
past Tescos, past the illiterate graffiti
delimiting horizons. Wee Timmy & Sheila
are away with the mother, never him,
and beyond is the sea, Portsmouth!
I’ll join the Navy, lose ten stone
and stop shopping at the Paki corner store,
every lost ounce will keep Britain free
as once it were before.

Now the French are over the sea ,
behaving themselves,
and the good old days are o’er;
I can’t go running down the docks
like I did with Maggie and Silly Liz
nor act the happy whore. My life
will change, you’ll see, and a range
of opportunities, those things

will open out before me, no more
charity communities, no more
pill-popping take on life. I will
attack France, they seem to need it,
and they are right across the water
within, you might say, spitting distance.
Never mind Iraq and Afghanistan
so far the fuck away you’d be having no interest.
You need wars with people you know.

461. Wessex

2011-12-19T21:35:00.000+09:00

A parliament of rooks complain
vociferously, tut-tutting like indignant counsellors
while their carrion cousins, irrepressible crows
swoop and dive like Spitfires: an unpopular
breed of bird, I know, but dashing fliers
with a delinquent sense of fun.
Stand and watch them on a winter’s day.

I love the way, when grounded, they hop,
hoppity-hop, exactly like crotchety pensioners,
and then take off soaring into the sky,
with a kyaa –kyaa, such a contemptuous cry,
and then they drop a little poop on your windscreen.
Bastards! You can’t help but swear and admire
these rock’n’rollers of the avian world.

The broads are soggy
under grey December skies.
The grass rises in tufts and clumps
making for hard walking, making you
glad to be wearing your Wellies again,
with your old Army jacket, your corduroys,
that sense of being safe from the cold.

Tottle! (Aristotle), the setter comes to heel
with his sad, injurious, accusing eyes:
silly boy, that was never any bloody rabbit!
(And just how the hell would you know, sir?)
he says, clear as a bell, in doggy language,
and you give him a rough pat, but he shakes you off,
and lopes loosely, wonderfully across the field.

Dear old boy! Ten years since he was a tiny pup
out of Mirabelle, and she was one of those seven
tiny little things my sister and I … my sister!
Well, those were those days with the Commander
and my Mum, and holidays from that wretched school,
and as I trudge towards the sturdy old familiar house
I think of the warming dram, of the cold welcome.

460. Yoshitakamura

2011-12-09T16:14:00.001+09:00

Darling girl.
Do you care what they may say?

Sweetness and light. Shadows.
How it all comes together.

One last kiss ...
a cool firmness
slowly yielding.

Kyrie eleison.

You are so young.

Those tear stains on your cheeks.
That steadiness in your eyes.
Well, then.

Let us go into dark eternal night
together, smiling bravely,
holding hands.

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

This sort of thing happens over here quite a lot. Generally the lovers are married people -- not to one another, that is -- or else the very young whose families are adamantly opposed to the love choice of a son or daughter, usually the girl.

459. Samhain

2011-11-24T22:55:00.001+09:00

Coinnigh fós mo chroí amaideach,
ní cúis náire dom os comhair na ndaoine.
Impigh mé de tú, mé a iarraidh seo.

Be quiet now my foolish heart,
bring me no shame in the eyes of others.
I ask this of you, I implore you.

Lá go leor agus oíche tar éis a ritheadh
i measc daoine nach bhfuil mo chuid féin a -
Fós tá siad chun bheith amhlaidh.

Many are the days and nights gone by
among this people who are not my own -
Yet they have become so.

Chreid mé mo shaol go raibh mianach,
agus tá sé seo fíor ag amanna áirithe
ach nach bhfuil ag amanna eile.

I had a thought my life was my own,
and this is a true thing at certain times
but at other times not so.

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

This is not "classical" Irish, more like a stab in the dark - a poke in the right direction. Gaelgeori (the language purists) will be coming after me like the Morríghan. I'll stay a skip and a step ahead: the story of my life so far.

Samhain had its beginnings in an ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead. The Celtic peoples, who were once found all over Europe, divided the year by four major holidays. According to their calendar, the year began on a day corresponding to November 1st on our present calendar. November marked both an ending and a beginning in the eternal cycle.

The pronunciation (for you language freaks) is "saah-wan". Feb. 1 is "Imbolg"; May 1 is "Bealtaine" (bell-tawn); Aug. 1 is "Lunasa" (loon-asa). Instant Celts!

458. Hamamatsu

2011-11-19T14:43:00.002+09:00

Customize your own digital slideshow

457. armistice

2011-11-11T15:46:00.002+09:00

No blinding light of tropical day
nor secrecy of northern night
can further mask our desolation:

an idea is not responsible
for the lives of those who hold it.

Flotsam, jetsam,
such ribald anarchic terms.

Death was kind to you:
a scant scattering of mourners,
myself among them.

The garbled service
was dismal. Predictably so.
I could hear your dry chuckle.

I shall attend your funeral, old boy,
or else you shall attend mine.
I remember you saying that.

People live
as long as other people live
who still remember.

121. ARMISTICE DAY

2011-11-10T10:45:00.003+09:00

This is a previous post (2005) which I have bumped up to the head of the queue. Nothing has changed in the facts nor in the feelings and opinions expressed since the time it was first written. "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori" (It is Sweet and Just/ to die for your Country) may have been an idea scorned and even abhorred in the minds of the young men of the time. Too many of them did die anyway.

Some of the links may be out-of-date. The original post is six years old.

Canadian Memorial, Ypres

Reflections on the Great War of 1914-18

The Great War of 1914-18 has exercised a fascination over me ever since I was a young child. I can remember as a small boy seeing elderly veterans in Dublin barber shops, several of them missing an arm or a leg. I was too young to be taken seriously, of course, and they would just ignore me after a smile or a pat on the head and address themselves to each other. I can't remember much of their talk but there was something in the wry way they would look at one another and smile that I have never forgotten. Memory is selective: when we try to write down the truth of the past we often end up writing fiction, sometimes lies. But I can still remember those faces. Like most children, I realized that the adult world was full of mysteries, yet there was something about the understanding between these men that was different from anything else I had encountered before in the world of Big People. There was a knowledge of some kind which they shared and, whatever it was, it was clear they were never going to share it with me or with anyone else.

The First World War was not popular in Ireland. More than 300,000 young Irishmen went over to fight in France, Gallipoli and the Middle East and 50,000 never returned. A large number of these volunteers won medals for heroic actions but there is no public recognition of their bravery and no public memorials to the sacrifice of the dead. There are no symbols of remembrance. Our country ignores and forgets these young men because they were fighting for the Wrong People in the Wrong War. They have been erased from the national consciousness.

Sunk off the Irish coast, en route from New York to England

I have always felt there was something wrong about this. The President of the Republic went to Ypres a few years ago and joined hands with the Queen of England to honour the Irish dead of the First World War: two middle-aged ladies worried about the rain and their hairdos and what to say at lunch. It was a well-meaning gesture but I don't think it would have made much impression on my soldiers in the barber shop.

The people we are taught to admire in the Irish Republic are the militants who refused to join the British Army for the sake of 'Poor Little Belgium' and who instigated a very serious behind-the-lines rebellion for Poor Little Ireland instead. Our streets and railway stations are named after these rebels of 1916 and all the nondescript concrete statues in every country town are dedicated to local heroes of the independence struggle. Any connection with the British military, however glorious the deeds or hardwon the medals, is considered embarrassing and unmentionable, like a rude noise in church.

When you cross the Border into the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, everything changes. The statues and monuments tell a different story. In each (Protestant) village and town there are prominent memorials to the Glorious Dead of the First World War. The Second World War, and the names of the dead, serve merely as a footnote. There is a very good reason for this. The First World War was a Blood Sacrifice, with casualties in every village and city street and it is held up dripping red in the face of each successive UK government whenever they talk of accommodation or compromise with the Irish Republic. We fought and died for you, say the Northern Loyalists, and these people in the South tried to stab you in the back. And don't you forget it!

This was at the back of my mind when I rented a car and drove around the battlefields of the Somme. To understand the logic behind what happened here you need to strip your mind of emotion and sentiment and look at the technology of the war, the mathematical calculations that controlled mass slaughter. This may indeed be what you set out to do, but it becomes impossible as the day wears on. The horror and the pity soon breaks through any attempt at a brisk and objective approach. Try as you may to keep your imagination in check, the cumulative effect of the rows and rows of headstones in the many — the so many — neatly-tended cemeteries bears down on you throughout the day. You feel sorry for all these young men. Then you begin to feel a rising anger at the way all these young lives were cut off. As the day progresses you become more and more benumbed by the enormity of the slaughter and your mind slips into a state of helplessness and dull disbelief.

The pressure to enlist was unrelenting

In 1914 the Germans had been stopped in their push through Belgium into Northern France because they had allowed gaps to open between their three separate attacking armies. In a clumsy attempt to close these gaps they had suffered attack on their right flank by Gallieni and the new Paris army (hurried to the front in taxi cabs). They fell back from the River Marne to the River Aisne and dug in. The French and British attacked, took losses, and dug in also. Each side then tried to outflank the other to the west in a 'Race to the Sea' but this ended in a line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coastline south of Ostend to the Swiss border more than 900 kilometres away. A stalemate ensued, but the pressure was on the French and their British allies to recover lost territory.

French Mobilisation Order, August 1914

How had this mass slaughter begun? Historians explain it in terms of rivalries and alliances set in motion by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne. By early 1915 the causes of the war hardly mattered any more for the nations involved. Each was engaged in a struggle for national survival.

It was a new kind of warfare. Cavalry soon proved to be useless and infantry attacks on defended positions produced horrific casualties. It became an artillery war with each side pounding the defenses of the other. In September 1915 there was a major British offensive in which the poison gas they planned to use came floating back into their own trenches. As Robert Graves describes it: 'Come on!- 'Get back, you bastards!' - 'Gas turning on us!' - 'Keep your heads, you men!' -'Back like hell, boys!' - 'Whose orders?' - 'What's happening?' -'Gas!' - 'Back!' -'Come on!' - 'Gas!' - ''Back'. A 'bloody balls-up' is what the troops called it. The historians call it the Battle of Loos.

Mud and rain were a constant misery

Warfare had entered the industrial age with a vengeance. There had been forewarnings in the American Civil War (repeating rifles, massed artillery), the Boer War (barbed wire, concrete strongpoints) and the Russo-Japanese War (better artillery, machine guns) but it took a long time for the First World War generals, many of them cavalry officers, to come to grips with these new conditions. The essential problem was that the infantry could not cover the ground to the enemy trenches, in spite of heavy bombardment, before the enemy reappeared from its deep dugouts to direct machine gun fire on the attackers and call in accurate artillery fire. Even if an attack were successful and overran the first line of trenches, the defenders could run back to a second or third line. The railways ran up to the support areas of the defending side so that reinforcements could be rushed into the battle more quickly and in far greater numbers than the surviving soldiers of the other side could press home an attack.

German bunker, Ypres

In 1916 these facts had not yet been assimilated by the Allied Command. The British were planning a 'Big Push' to take some of the pressure off their French allies who were being hard pressed at Verdun. The attack was to be on a 40 km. front along the previously quiet sector of the Somme/Ancre valley. Three hundred thousand troops were shipped from England to rear areas in France and moved up to the line. Most of them were volunteers of Kitchener's New Army. These were young men with no previous military experience who had joined up in a rush of enthusiasm in 1914. Many of them had joined up together in the 'Pal's Battalions' which assured them of serving together with their friends and workmates. "Perhaps no story of the First World War is as poignant as that of the Pals," writes John Keegan, "It is a story of a spontaneous and genuinely popular mass movement which has no counterpart in the modern, English-speaking world and perhaps could have none outside its own time and place: a time of intense, almost mystical patriotism." This policy later turned out to be a public relations disaster when the casualty lists came to be posted: a whole generation of young local men were wiped out almost overnight so that factories, workplaces, city streets and whole villages were plunged into mass mourning.

The pressure to enlist was unrelenting (2)

One of these groups was much larger than a battalion (about 800-1000 men), or a brigade (3 battalions). It was a Division which numbered between 10-12,000 men and which saw upwards of 80,000 men pass through it before the war had ended. These were the hardline Sons of Ulster, the Protestant stalwarts of Northern Ireland who had joined the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) to oppose Home Rule for Ireland and fight against the British themselves, if need be, for the right to remain British. Civil war in Ireland had been the overriding concern in Britain during the summer of 1914, as the newspapers and diaries of the time show clearly. The illegal and possibly treasonous UVF (they had imported arms from Germany) enlisted en masse at the outbreak of war and were granted separate unit status within the British Army under their own officers. Under Kitchener's orders, Southern Irish volunteers were denied the same privilege and scattered among a variety of pre-existing regiments under English officers.

Kitchener makes it personal

General Haig was the British Commander-in-Chief in France who planned the Somme offensive. He was a Lowland Scot, authoritarian, hardworking, dull, unimaginative; he planned to hurl his unseasoned troops at the enemy positions in hopes of a major breakthrough. He actually intended to send in the cavalry on the Somme -- this happened on one occasion near High Wood: horses and men were shot and blown to pieces -- since his main concern was to overrun the German trenches and restore a war of movement in the open land behind the enemy lines. He called up 1500 guns and laid down an onslaught on the German forward and support trenches that continued non-stop for 7 days and nights. When it was over he believed the New Army troops could simply walk over and take possession of the battered German defenses. As untrained troops, they were instructed to walk not run in order to keep their lines straight and orderly. The young citizen-soldiers were enthusiastic and eager to "have a crack at the Hun" as they collected in huge numbers at the junction of the Somme and Ancre rivers.

To get to this area of France (Picardy) you take the high-speed TGV from Paris to Lille then transfer to the local line to Arras. When you get to Arras you would do well to head for the Ould Shebeen, the Irish pub across the square from the station. This could save you a lot of time, particularly if your command of the French language is not that great (and the French outside Paris are resolutely monolingual). John O'Rourke, the owner, or Eoin or one of the boys will help you to find a hotel room and talk you through the particulars of a Rentacar contract. You need a car if you want to get about because the battlefields are extended over a wide area. If you are lucky (as I was) then Chris Farrell from the Commonwealth Graves Commission will drop by the pub and get talking to you. He will invite you to his office the following morning to get all the latest maps (modern roads marked with the old trenchlines) and give you much useful advice if you're not sure where to begin.

I knew where I was going to begin. I drove south on the main road to Bapaume and turned off on the road to Auchonvilliers ('Ocean Villas') which lies northwest of the town. Just outside this village is Beaumont Hamel, the jumping off point for the 29th Division. You can walk it, you can see what happened. The troops were getting pounded as they moved into their forward trenches (still there) even before the battle began because the Germans -- as usual -- were on higher ground.

Jumping-off trenches, Beaumont-Hamel

When they went over the top the ground fell away in a slope and this left them lined up in rows for the machine guns. They were mowed down and slaughtered. The German lines in the Y-Ravine were only 400 metres away. You can walk that distance today over the grassy lumpy field (lots of grown-over shell holes ) and when you look back from the German side you can see how exposed they were, such perfect targets. The Newfoundland Regiment, fresh from Canada, took 75% casualties in this failed attack. In his novel "Tender is the Night" Scott Fitzgerald has his main character Dick Diver visit these same trenches with a group of friends: 'See that little stream --we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it -- a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs ... This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time ... This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation between the classes.'

The Y-Ravine, Beaumont-Hamel

Beyond these trenches on a high ridge to the right lies Thiepval. Here the 36th (Ulster) Division went over into a hailstorm of fire. So much for the destruction of the opposition by artillery. The Germans survived the high explosives in their deep dugouts and came out to meet the attack with machine guns. The trusting young soldiers who walked over in rows (walk, don't run) were shot down in their hundreds and thousands --'We were very surprised to see them walking," a German machine-gunner recalls, "We had never seen that before ... When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them." It was murder. Even the Germans sickened of the slaughter and ceased firing when the dazed survivors began stumbling back to their own lines. The young Edmund Blunden (war poet and later Professor of English at Tokyo University) concluded that the stalemate was hopeless. "By the end of the day," he wrote, "both sides had seen ... the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither (side) had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning." Idealism and patriotic fervour died on the killing fields of the Somme. Youth entered a hard new era in which 'abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.' Hemingway could write this in 1929 ('A Farewell to Arms'); in the summer of 1914 no one would have understood what he was talking about.

The Ulster Division did as well as it could. In some parts of the line they managed to gain the opposing trenches but had to fall back later in the day. Many of them went over the top wearing their Orange Sashes screaming 'Fuck the Pope!' and 'King Billy Forever' and were machine-gunned into the mud. They died in droves. At the end of the day they had lost most of their officers and more than half of their men. It was a shambles.

On that one day, July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties, 20,000 dead. The wounded cried out for three days in the wasteland between the trenches. The British Army had never before and has never since lost so many men in a single attack.

It was reported , of course, as a victory. Truth is the first casualty of any war, and it had completely flown out the window by 1916 as both sides, aided by patriotic journalists, kept the factual horrors of the war carefully distant from the people at home. Haig persisted in a series of follow-up attacks which gained him about 4000 yards between August and November when the offensive was called off. He had lost 420,000 troops by then. The Germans had lost 280,000.

When you drive around this peaceful undulating landscape its occasional forests or collection of small woodlands (so deadly during the conflict) seem to be placed here and there with a very French sense of propriety, as if the inhabitants were in agreement with their forefathers that such long stretches of yellow and green farmlands needed to be interspersed with several tastefully placed acres of trees. It is hard to believe, it is inconceivable that so much concentrated violence took place over these rolling farmlands -- then little more than a sea of mud -- in which tens of thousands of young soldiers died. But the reminders are ever present in the form of the cemeteries.

The cemeteries are a map of the various attacks because they were built where the soldiers died. There are hundreds of these cemeteries scattered about the fields of Belgium and France, more than 400 in the region of the Somme alone, and each of them is carefully tended to this day by the Commonwealth (formerly Imperial) War Graves Commission. The larger ones such as Tyne Cot on the Passchendaele Ridge in Flanders contain thousands of graves in row after row after row. It is a chastening thing to walk among the headstones: name, regiment, 19 years old; name, regiment, 21 years old; name, regiment, 23 years old; name, regiment, 20 years old. On many of the headstones there are no names at all. The inscription reads 'A Soldier of the Great War' and underneath it says 'Known Unto God'. This means the poor fellow was blown into smithereens and they couldn't put the bits together. There are 73,077 names on the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme and another 54,896 on the Menin Gate in Ypres which simply records the names of the men who disappeared. Many just sank into the mud and their bodies were never recovered.

War Graves near Albert (Somme),

Even today the soil turns up its grim reminders. In Flanders and on the fields of the Somme the farmers turn up several tons of rusting shells every year. They are still dangerous and explosions claim the lives of about a dozen local people each year. The unexploded shells are placed at the sides of the road for the Army bomb squads to collect and detonate and this is done every year during the ploughing season. You can see them in small rusting heaps as you drive by on the road. You can stop and handle them. You can take one home as a souvenir if you like. After 88 years these things are still capable of exploding.

About 800 metres east of the village of La Boiselle on the Albert-Bapaume road is an enormous mine crater. The English dug under the German lines and blew them up with several tons of explosive. The crater sits in the fields today by the side of a narrow farm road: it is 30 metres deep and at least 50 metres in diametre. There is a cross nearby and because it was July (July is the anniversary of the 1916 battle and many, many English come over each summer) the cross was surrounded by hundreds of blood-red paper poppies, the symbol of the fallen soldiers. There were dozens of hand-written notes and prayers: But one note in particular caught my attention: surrounded by a wreath of poppies it read "In Memory of Private George Nugent, 3rd Tyneside Scottish, Killed 1st July 1916. Found at Lochnagar Crater October 1998." George Nugent had been missing for 82 years.

Of all the verses which recall the sacrifice of this army of the dead -- and it is a veritable army, since it has been calculated that it would take three and a half days for the dead of the British Empire alone, marching four abreast, to pass through central London -- the one that we have all heard seems to have passed into collective memory; "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:/ Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning/ We will remember them. " Geoff Dyer, in a gentle but penetrating meditation on the meaning of this war and the way we remember it, points out that the words were written by Laurence Binyon in September 1914: before the fallen actually fell. " 'For the Fallen'", he writes, "is a work not of remembrance but of anticipation, or more accurately, the anticipation of remembrance: a foreseeing that is also a determination."

Menin Gate interior, Ypres

And this brings me back to the question which I am still unable to answer, and which compelled me to visit the battlefields that summer. Why does this war still exert such a mesmerising hold over the European (particularly British) imagination? It occurred nearly a century ago and within a short number of years -- if not already -- there will be no living survivors. Yet it resonates in our collective memory to a far greater extent than even the Second World War. Perhaps this is because we recognize that the Second War, for all its horrors, could never have been possible without the First. Hitler could never have become the leader of Germany without the humiliation of the German defeat in 1918. It would have been unthinkable for a civilized European nation at the heart of Europe to be taken over by a band of political thugs -- unless it had suffered such a shattering blow to its self-esteem that the social verities and the shared assumptions of the past quite simply fell apart. Nor, it must be said, would the French or British (not to mention the Americans) have tolerated Hitler's rise to power without the memories of the carnage of 1914-18. It was this memory of the countless dead which stayed their hands in the hope of a peaceful outcome.

It could be argued -- and I, for one, am inclined to believe this -- that the 20th century really only lasted for 75 years. It began with the guns of August 1914 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in November 1989. The First World War and its repercussions created this world.

This deeply traumatic war could probably have been avoided. The inevitability of history is a myth. When we look back on the past we tend to be severely critical in our judgements and conclusions with regard to the statesmen and politicians of the time, and even to the vagaries of popular opinion, because we already know what happens next. What we need to remember is that the past was the "present" for the people who lived through it and that for them the future was just as unknowable and as full of possible outcomes as it is for us today. Things could have turned out quite differently.

In August 1914 all the options had run out. War could no longer be avoided. After weeks of frantic but fruitless diplomacy the statesmen of Europe watched their stable and confident world march to the brink of a catastrophe whose horrors none of them could fully comprehend. One of them, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, had an inkling of what was to happen. As he gazed from his office over the darkening streets of Whitehall he murmured, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

(There is also a thoughtful article in the "New Yorker" -- mid-August 2004 -- which I would urge you to read).

456. Ireland in October

2011-10-23T13:16:00.004+09:00

The relentless rain

hard and cold

lashes against the windows.

We pull across the curtains

lay more sods of turf

upon the flickering, sputtering fire.

We say nothing, pay attention

to our drams of single malt.

We hear, for we cannot ignore

the half-human howling shrieks

of the wild Atlantic winds.

I don't know, says Uncle Liam,

how much of this you can understand.

ii.

Upstairs

in this whitewashed cottage,

planted, perversely,

on the edge of nearly nowhere,

sits a four-poster bed

with sagging springs

in a room no longer used

nor visited; it is occupied now

by dust and sepia photographs.

The procreative urge:

a man and a woman within this room,

unleashed seven generations

of this failing family.

The pounding rain, the howling wind,

in times past, now, and in the coming times to be,

deride all our decent hopes, laugh at our faltering sense

of connection, mock our humanity.

iii

On that upstairs bedroom wall

hangs a faded stitching sampler:

"God Bless Our Happy Home",

accomplished, by her own hand,

by Emily May MacCarthy,

on October 20, 1843.

She was the fifth of eleven children

and one of the seven

who starved to death

along with her despairing parents.

Tadgh and his brother Michael

crossed the wide and unknown ocean,

that angrily rolling sea beyond these windows,

and landed in Ameri-kay; they were lucky

to have missed the war in Mexico

and sent for their two surviving sisters.

Both brothers were killed in the Civil War,

not quite able to pay for "replacements",

and so died, bewildered, for Mr. Lincoln.

I descend from Maureen.

She was the second sister.

iv.

Upstairs

there are many many old photographs,

framed here and there on top of stolid furniture.

Dapper gentlemen with large moustaches.

Ladies with long dresses and wide-brimmed hats.

They stare into long-ago unforgiving lenses

with comical expressions of puzzled defiance.

At other times they pose stiffly,

arranged among the most tasteful studio

backdrops: a small side table,

a pillar or two, potted palms.

James Boyle Roche. Photographer.

15 Bridge Street. Ennis

is stamped discreetly, a faded oval

in the left-bottom corner: the building

still exists, the ground floor

is now a fast-food restaurant.

In some photographs

there are wedding couples,

tense and unrelaxed, they stare

sightlessly at us from the past

across a chasm of years

we can never never even begin

to comprehend. He sits, she stands,

but she places a tentative

pleading hand

upon his rigid manly shoulder.

There is another

out-of-place picture

of my great-uncle Marteen,

shot dead in our civil war.

A cocky 24-year-old

with a cheeky grin.

He sits, brandishing

an enormous revolver,

smoking a jaunty cigarette.

I can tell from the look of him

we could have had a drink.

vi.

Then there are cloche hats

on rather dumpy women,

the baggy suits on the gents

who grin and squint in the harsh sunlight

of long forgotten days; they sport

ridiculously shortened neckties

and all seem to be having

an awfully good time:

my unknown, unknowable

dead ancestors.

A flicker of empathy

if not of recognition

slips through

this threnody of regret.

vii.

Liam is uncharacteristically

subdued, even embarrassed:

he shifts from foot to foot, in front

of the now warm and blazing fire.

Listen, I think I'm going to bed,

it's been a really long day, I say.

Liam frowns. An awkward

silence ensues: Emmmm ...

Listen to me. There's something

I really need to tell you.

It's about the family ....

It's OK, Liam. No need.

It will keep for another hundred years.

455. The Joy of Creation

2011-10-23T12:58:00.001+09:00

Three years ago, on an October Monday,
as rooks sarcastically called down from the trees,
he went into his final freeze, lost it, went gaga.
This cataclysmic event is recorded, we have it on CCTV,
downloaded, with GPS, faithfully burned to DVD.

Yet he regales us still with those tired familiar themes,
a combination of medium-grade pathos and low parody,
in those oh-so-catchy, rather tricky combinations,
so utterly repellent to his gaggle of critics,
so attractive to his growing legion of fans.

In a recent interview in Hello magazine
conducted in the artist’s rather dingy home,
stars of Daytime TV declined the offer of tea,
surrounded by cats (and quite possibly rats),
and half-eaten containers of ancient food.

The hirsute, the rather scantily-clad poet,
oblivious to winds whistling through broken windows,
insisted that inspiration came from the Attic Dance.
Rising from his bed of rubber, rather stubbly thorns,
(while admitting that nails were still rather beyond him)

He adopted a rigid and rather slantwise stance
at an angle of approximately forty degrees.
He had his left elbow on the windy window ledge
and his right leg gently waving in the air.
This, we were told, is how all good poems begin.

454. Liberty & Security v Endless War

2011-10-13T11:45:00.002+09:00

Don’t get me started on the Israelis, tearing their robes in sorrow. I’m as sorry as anyone about the Nazi Holocaust during WWII but why do the Palestinians have to pay for German sins? Why did America and European nations refuse to take in Jewish refugees from the Hitler terror even before the war broke out? Simple answer – didn’t care, didn’t want to. So now we dump the problem on others.

Palestine - A Land Without People for a People Without Land. Total and utter nonsense.

To this day the Irish government recognizes the State of Israel as ‘de facto’ and not ‘de jure’ which means that we accept the fact of its existence but not the ideology that lies behind it, i.e. Zionism, which we correctly and accurately describe as racist and selective.

We know all about this Chosen People brainwash from our own experience with a “Protestant State for a Protestant People” in the north of our own island. This kind of thinking is unacceptable in the modern world and the longer the Israelis persist in their persecution of the Palestians and their usurpation of their lands the longer our sympathies will remain with the Palestinians.

So-called terror tactics (all War is unleashed terror) bring no results without a strong political structure. A weaker power cannot afford tanks and airplanes (never mind uniforms) so it goes to war on the strength of a collective ideal – usually a fuzzy idea of liberty and the shape of things to come and a very sharp and focussed wish to expel unwelcome foreign occupation. You take horrific casualties and you wear your enemy down, and in the end you bring him into a negotiated settlement which is what happened not only in Ireland (first South, and then North) but also in Algeria and Vietnam. Also America in the 18^th century, come to think of it. Other examples are there to be found. Try Google. Without a strong and united (and popularly supported) political structure behind the armed struggle, ready and able to negotiate with the Other Side, the guerrilla fighters are left out on a limb in a cycle of endless slaughter. This is the basic and essential factor that the Palestinians so far have not been able to get their heads around. And so the cycle grinds on.

453. Iffy/ Jim

2011-10-08T09:36:00.002+09:00

Biddy Maloney down the road had a cat called Iphigenia, Iffy, and they were a bit of a literary family and not above letting you know of it. There's a fox in the story as well, young Seamus, known as Jimmy, whose poor father, Pronsias (Francis) was eaten by the hounds of the wicked English when they were still hulloing hulloing about the place which was before the homemade landmines went in, the kind your granny could set off with a little red button. That was great craic altogether with everyone's granny blowing the shite out of the local landlords until there were none of them left at all at all. So we sent over a message to ask would they not send a few more across to us, but they said NO, in a rather bad-tempered way, and that's when we stopped paying rents and the like and it was a very depressing time altogether with no landlords shooting up into the air. Up in Dublin they call it the War of Independence but down here we called it Granny's Revenge. They were all raped as serving girls for this is what the English did and some (let's be fair) enjoyed it because if you don't ask for it, it's not your fuckin fault. Some of them were faultless 28 or 40 times before marrying 84-year-old psychopathic local farmers and glommed up the land when their husbands laid down on the road for a rest and got run over by the Clonakilty bus or else went off in the hills to talk to Lugh or Emer or Mananaan and got struck with lightning bolts for their pains. You don't want to be talking to ancient Celtic gods with short attention spans. Annyway, after the Red Button revolution didn't all the grannies die, one after another, all fuckin dead. God be with them, acushla mo chrói. Sure there was no more excitement, do you see? They had no interest in sex whatsoever, the average age being 85, and with no more landlords to blow to kingdom come, sure, what was the point of living? They died and the fairies came in. This aroused the community because the fairies wear very short dresses, stop growing at the age of 20, and look like Kylie Minogue on a very very good day.

Kylie says Hello ... what am I doing in this poem?

Well, things happened. There's an awful lot of good-looking kids skateboarding around the neighbourhood.

But there was always Iphigenia and Seamus. Never mind the grannies and the fairies and the English. These are passing things. The fields and the forests and the sky are forever.

Iphigenia was restless. She was lepping about like Biddy Maloney's goat, with the tail lashing hither and yon, the divil between us and all harm. Will yeh get off the fffn, (cough) table! Another cuppa? Yerra, Jayz and wouldn't I love one? O the split yellow eyes on you, you little so-and-so. Wait till I get you home! Tis in with the hens you'll be put waitin on Jimmy the Fox who'll come dashing in with the darkness of the night upon him and all the outraged hennies will be going chook-chook-chook and won't he be taking you away to Las Vegas, girl, or to some other strange and peculiar foreign part? Tis the long hard stroke of a father's hand you'd be needing, gerrl, but sure Jimmy will put the restraint upon yeh, and he but a young lad but the true son of his blessed father, God be good to him, taken up in the Hunt by the blashted English, God's curse on them for seven generations, and may their childer come out in spots and boils, but isn't he the good-lookin buckaroo with his eyes like diamonds and the flahhhoo of the red hair carefully set down, pomaded and ribboned in the way of a ginttleman, a squireen of the Old Blood, Dear God and Holy Mary, (ahh, would you stop your oul gallop?) Well then, sorr, isn't it like the Dana? Tuatha de Danaan, them as has gone below the ground?

452: RWC - Ireland into the Quarter Finals

2011-10-05T15:37:00.002+09:00

Ireland gets through to the Quarter-Finals of the Rugby World Cup on a sterling second-half performance by the Lads. Brilliant defense and great discipline in the face of several provocative incidents as the Italians grew ever more frustrated. Great teamwork with no glory-hogging as last second handoffs guaranteed the tries. O'Gara steady as a rock in the opening phases and best of all his replacement Johnny Sexton landed two difficult conversions in the closing quarter to lay to rest all those nagging questions about his loss of kicking form. An excellent performance and if the momentum holds we should just about edge Wales -- it will be a very tough match! -- and face either England or France in the semi-finals. Personally, I hope it's England since we get on OK with the French .... !!

ERIN ABU!!!

451. Changing Courses

2011-09-24T05:30:00.001+09:00

It’s not a thing you think much about
unless your pride, for some reason,
is affronted: somebody pushes you
in a cinema queue, your girlfriend dumps you
and this unreasoning rage overwhelms you
and you want to kill. You are quite capable of killing.
This is what governments depend upon
in times of war. It is so easy to get young men
to kill one another with bombs and bayonets.

DNA, nurture, toilet training.
Most of all schooling, I think.
We bash one another on the rugby pitch
with sheer delight in bone-crushing tackles,
smashing into people we were talking to
yesterday evening over tea and biscuits
in a genuine effort to break bones or cause
permanent disabilities: my dear chap, so sorry.
It’s just the sort of thing one does, you see.

The weak go under and the strong survive,
trailing their knuckles along the ground
along the raked driveways of carefully assorted pebbles.
The worst of them go into the Army or Navy
and the rest of us open discos or restaurants.
I jest. We go into Law or the City or Business
or become one-hit super rock musicians
to die then wretchedly of an overdose in Battersea
or some other such unspeakable place.

One should actually live in the river, not to be north or south of it.

The Irish, I have been reliably told, make jokes about us,
far more clever (damn them!) than the witless Scots,
and as for the Welsh, I rather shudder to mention them:
they live off there in the West, muttering among themselves
in some unintelligible jargon, shooting dark looks here and there,
and pretending to be rather clever, if you please.
I don’t know what this country is coming to, I must say
it has changed a great deal since I was a British Bulldog,
huffing, puffing and running about, doing rather senseless things

Which is the essence of being English. These bloody Celts!
I wish they had packed up and departed when we arrived,
But oh, no! Oh no no. They insisted on outlasting their welcome.
Dagger in the back as soon as you look at them, the knaves!
Rather fetching women (rather!) some catchy little tunes,
but no sense of propriety, none, no savoir de faire.
They insisted on all those idiotic battles with their antique weapons
along with the howling of their bagpipes like quarreling cats.
My dear, the noise, the noise! There were times one could feel quite unwell.

My ancestor’s advice was to murder the lot of them, man woman and child.
Sound, solid reasoning. It would have become a green and pleasant land
full of happy cheerful Englishmen with all the local vermin removed:
alas, this was not to be. This poxy island will sit next to us forever
with its breezy informality, its diddly-ai silly music, its disrespect,
its archaic alternative view of history.

450. Yesterday's Typhoon

2011-09-23T13:51:00.000+09:00

Nothing …
means nothing compared to the rain
as it comes slashing through like artillery,
as it comes bending and breaking trees and bushes,
invading unclosed doors, hopping, hopping angrily.

Is this, like, serious?

Jumping into the car, dodging falling branches,
I feel the wheels getting lifted off the road.
God, how I love a good typhoon! You think
how the hell people manage to die until it suddenly,
O Christ, nearly happens to you. A gust of wind
hurls the car across the road into the track of a truck
which bleats and moans and avoids by inches.
Sancta Maria! That was a close one.

Maybe try to go home?
Home, when you get there, is battened down.
Storm shields come out like the Second World War
and every window and door is sealed. We know
that a lot of people die in typhoons. I used to think
that was bad luck, getting caught in the open, but what
the hell can you do when your house gets blown away?

Pray.
Dig.
Die.
Wave a British Passport :
(don’t laugh, these idiots BELIEVE!)

449. The Emigrant's Letter

2011-09-16T10:06:00.002+09:00

I left Ireland, not in the least unwillingly,
First at the canter and then at the gallop,
Not for boring blah-blah economic reasons,
No, to get away from the women! Hang about,
And you’d end up married to one of them!
Look at my cousins. Look at everyone! Well, don’t.
If it’s cash you’re after you’d still go to America.
Stands to reason: Hong Kong with English only.
And all you need is to play golf and be White
And stand up when they play their silly songs
And thump your chest and say, God’s Own Country!
They’re such hypocrites themselves, they’ll never never
Call your bluff. It’s a fuckin doddle, so it is.
Downside is, they’re always having a war on the go
Which is how the real money comes rolling in.
But never never never go on the fiddle with taxes.
Pay them off, they’ll leave you blissfully alone.
It’s so simple, dear God, it’s almost a crime.
Me, I went to Japan. Are you cracked or what?
I remember being asked that, almost continuously,
By tubby balding idiots with spritely Irish wives.
Spritely. Sweet weeping Jesus. Assay a bashful grin,
Nibble at the rock-hard scone, don’t spit out the tea,
And hope the pub stays open. Some pub is always open.
Think of Osaka. Think of Yasuko and Sanae, Michiko,
Akane, Sachiko, Rie, Rieko, Masako, Mari, Tomoko, Tomoe!
You can get a hard-on just from reciting their names.
So svelte and slim, so smooth-skinned, so non-Catholic!
So entirely free from sin. Sin? We say bad manner.
You should come back home, boy, and settle down!
Get away from me, yeh baldy fuckin clown,
I can think of three hundred reasons and more
For leaving Dublin Town.

448. Mediterranean Blue

2011-09-02T15:35:00.001+09:00

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447. Dublin Rambler Slide Show

2011-09-01T11:37:00.004+09:00

This is the Long Version, pretty much chronological (as the pics were taken). It is breezy, cheerful, disconcerting, jumpy, sometimes funny, at times discombobulating ... much as the City itself!

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446. Aughrim

2011-08-29T02:57:00.003+09:00

Around, around, around,
Sweet Billy boy, dear Billy:
The fires come rising in the West
Na tinte ag ardú in Iarthar.
And I must sleep and go to rest,
Sweet Billy, darlin’ Billy.

The sound, the sound,
Of the pipes come sweetly calling:
Over Ballykelly and Glenmatyre
Milis thagann ardú ar an aer.
Sleep, sleep by the campfire,
Billy, O sweet Billy.

Our hopes are fading, falling,
Your father looks not well:
Your sisters keep unto their room
Bogadh ón am atá caite ar an todhchaí
A dagger will hasten on their doom
If your army fails us, Billy Boy.

The shades are falling, calling,
Down from the mountains, Billy:
No more do the wild trumpets ring
Sin le bás in Éirinn ina ghlóir … onóir!
We have lost again, lost everything,
Sweet Billy, Oh … sweet Billy!

Battle of Aughrim

------------------------------------------------------
Gaelic lines in the poem, by stanza:

1. The fires (come) rising in the west.
2. Sounds rise gently in the air.
3. We drift along from past to future.
4. Dying for Ireland is a glory … an honour.

445. Natsumi Hayashi - Tokyo's Floating Girl!

2011-08-25T11:45:00.008+09:00

This is another weird and wonderful example of what young people in this country get up to. The older generations seem to be totally out of the loop.

444. Eumenides

2011-08-23T21:52:00.006+09:00

Rain rain crash down on this hard old city
Where there is no love, where there is no pity.
Send down each drop like a hammer blow
To beat on the heads of the people below.
Turn over hoardings, throw down the turnstiles,
Shatter everything, all, for a hundred miles!
Send glass shards, jagged, straight in their eyes,
And laugh and laugh when they show surprise!
End up as as quickly as you’ve begun
Then swoop up swiftly to the sun.

Wait, wait, then, for another day.

The populace, the people, huddle below,
Trembling in shock, all think they know
There has to be, must be, a logical reason.
(All dissidents stand accused of treason.)
Lambs slaughtered, a wild cacophony of prayers
Lift up, skyswirling, in piteous layers.

Wait, wait, wait, for another day.

Tension subsides: there are services, dead are buried.
The life of the town picks up yet people are worried.
Can I go to the market, Dada? Get back to your room!
Step out of that door, child, you'll walk to your doom.
Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Nobody knows for sure.
If I live a good life, stop the nonsense, try to be pure?

The gods live beyond the clouds.
They live behind the sun.
Impenetrable.

They play desultory games,
Sleeping, now and then,
With one another’s wives.

Immortality, after all,
Wears you down.

Every now and then,
And just for the craic
They launch an attack.

443. The Great War (1914-18)

2011-08-22T16:27:00.004+09:00

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442. Oisín - the Irish band!

2011-08-21T21:51:00.001+09:00

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441. "On the Continong"

2011-08-17T22:49:00.002+09:00

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440. Edinburgh

2011-08-17T10:56:00.000+09:00

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439. London Calling

2011-08-15T23:44:00.000+09:00

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438. China (mostly Peking) Slide Show

2011-08-15T16:18:00.002+09:00

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437. The Dublin Rambler

2011-08-10T00:40:00.001+09:00

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436.5. Little Miss Morimoto

2011-07-16T10:25:00.003+09:00

Silence
is the ultimate response
to impulse, to importunity;
it casts its veil, its cloudlike mist
over lost opportunity.

In the pressing heat of those long summer days,
amid sonorous sounds of morning cicadas,
the icicle pierced, a splinter, a knife,
into the centre of my life: winter weighed in:
and as a frozen apple on the frost-whipped tree,
so died all feeling between you and me.

Your eyes, your smile,
the eternal feminine mystery,
returning, returning, recharged
in each cycle of human history.

The daily e-mails,
the archives of non-dawning day:
nothing, nothing could match their wonder
nor match their sense of play. Now
there are no e-mails at all.

Dear sweet girl.

Your black sparkling eyes,
your body like a bolt of thunder!
We met in June, parted in July,
and at times I can only wonder
why, why these things
come down like summer storms?

The approach of love
is as sudden as a flight of birds
over a morning lake, a rustle of wings
over stillness, a descent again into silence.

We had affection, yes.
We had style and languorous grace!
But when I reached out for your heart
there was nothing there, an absence,
nothing but an empty space.

Silence
is the ultimate response
to all the things we hope for,
to all the things we fear,
to all the things we cannot understand.

When you die, sweet girl,
as we all must die, a kaleidoscope
of images will flash, unbidden,
across your agéd, your withered brain,
and of our time, this pulsating summer,
no memory will remain.

And that will be the final end.
That will be the end. But will it?
Long after you and I are dust and clay
some earnest future scholar may
unearth this poem, and recall
the beauty, the cruelty of it all.

436. Blog Anniversary ... 7 Years!!

2011-06-16T10:44:00.006+09:00

Bloomsday, 2011

Jimmy (1882-1941)

This thing started on a whim on Bloomsday (June 16th) 2004 .... and has run away with itself. Thanks to all you people from all over the world who have dropped in for a quick look, a read, and occasional comments. The current plan is to continue!

Turning back the clock: the First Post, June 16, 2004:
http://dublinerinjapan.blogspot.com/2004/06/joyce-iraq-michael-collins-and-few.html

435. reflections upon the incidence of violence

2011-06-10T01:22:00.001+09:00

My dear friend Dean didn’t have a daddy
because something happened one night
when his dad got home drunk once too often.
He’d been on the first wave at Normandy,
he'd seen most of his friends shot to pieces,
and so the images stayed with him; he drank,
he beat his wife. That night she had a shotgun,
and what the Nazis couldn’t kill, she sure could.

Well, there was my second cousin,
she was married to some farmer
out in Iowa, happy, three healthy kids,
yet he blew them all away. The cousin
ran out the back, she had just about
got away when he caught up with her,
blew her to bits, then killed himself.
Guys get upset, stands to reason.

We didn’t really talk about it much.
Jack’s eldest son, Tim, was out in Iraq,
and he got himself blown to bits, too. Taking
the meaty fragments out of the sealed coffin,
Jack laid them reverently on the front lawn
and called in the neighbors. Barbecued
hamburgers, beer, fruit juice for the kids,
Stars and Stripes up on the flagpole.

Some party pooper called in the FBI;
they arrived in their big black SUVs,
their anoraks, their earplugs and shades.
Jack got himself arrested, they hauled
his ass into court, the media in total outrage.
They hit him up with some Federal Statute.
Judge, he said, I let the government take my son,
I was showing my friends how they sent him back.

Don’t know what they’re doing, most of the time,
these governments; just beneath that silky veneer
of competence, they lie. Not just sometimes, always.
When Paddy stepped off that transport at Tan Son Nhut
the first thing that hit him was the heat like a wave,
and the next was that awful overpowering smell:
they were burning, literally burning shit in barrels,
and he thought, O Christ, what the fff have I done?

No vaunted Green Card can be worth this, nor was it,
since, having survived that Asian madness, Paud left
God’s Own Country to God, but only if She wanted it,
and to the tossed salad of humans who lived there.
He felt no rancour nor regret. Like St. Paul before him,
he had shaken off the dust of the place from his sandals,
and had struck off down the road to different lands,
many of them in Asia. But none of them Vietnam.

We can walk away, as he walked away,
but I do not believe we can walk away forever.
I have seen the results of violence. And so have you.
Hating them (so we say) in the end we deal out the same.

434. A Chinese Poem

2011-05-30T01:46:00.002+09:00

As a young man listening to the girls
in a tower, I heard the sound of the rain,
while the red candle burnt dim in the damp air.
In middle age, travelling by boat on a river,
I listened to the rain falling, falling:
the river was wide and clouds drifted above.
I heard the solitary cry of a teal borne on the west wind.
And now in a cloister cell I hear the rain again.
My hair is grey and sparse: sadness and happiness,
separation and reunion, all seem one, they move
me no more. Let the rain come falling, falling
on deserted pavements until the day dawns.

-- Jung Jeh, 10th century

433. The Conversion to Islam of Conor Mac Art (part 5)

2011-05-17T11:53:00.002+09:00

Tá sé an mná nach olc, na mná go maith,
a dhéanamh, dar leat mar fear

November, 1563

Yardım et, yardım et Effendi! Genç kız ağrısı vardır!!
O for God's sake, what now? Yardım et, yardım et !
She was a young girl, trembling, not unattractive,
the principal handmaid to the alluring Yasmin Nur.

I swore. Ne diyorsun? Never mind. Is she sick?
No, no, she has a terrible pain in her little white foot.
Her little white foot. Seven hundred people in this caravan
and this girl has a pain in her little white foot.

Onu bana getir! Şimdi Şimdi! ... Evet, evet. B'duymak ve itaat!
Bring her to me, now. Yes, yes, go away ... . I have enough bloody
trouble without these silly women, the pair of them
tacked on to this serious mission at the very last moment.

This serious mission. Just what in the hell am I doing, tell me?
The Sultan called me in, spoke softly, opaquely, sent me off
in charge of 300 camels, said he would send messengers
and so far hasn't done so. Bert sharpens his killing sword.

I didn't want to bring him. I never wanted to see him again,
but here he is, leering, growling, grumbling, fussing about,
picking his nose. I give him a lash up the arse, distractedly,
just as the women walk in. Two young women. Silence.

She is ... like nothing I have ever seen before
in all the days of my young and nerve-plucked life:
she is covered of course as custom demands
but the fall of her robes sets off a perfect figure.

A slight embarrassment occurs between my thighs,
so I sit down abruptly, cross my legs (ouch!),
and attempt a very lordly masterful languid tone
which to my shame comes out as a squeak:

Nerede acı nedir? ... where, pray tell, is your pain ?
Ağrı benim ayak bileği içinde ... here in my ankle.
Ah, the ankle. A very delicate portion of the female anatomy,
and then I remember my Granny, by God I remember!

Suí síos le do thoil! ... no, sorry, I mean Lütfen oturun!
and immediately she sits like an obedient child,
a child with a burning blaze in her greygreen eyes.
Greygreen? Warning!! Circassian, a concubine?

Granny, ah, yes. Bert! Sah! Bring in a female goat!
One goat, as ordered, female, present and correct, sah!
Milk her into this bowl then slit her throat. Sah??
Give me your blade, poltroon, I'll do it myself.

He hands me his sharpened sword with cautious eyes,
knowing he could do this killing business a lot better,
but I do it myself, and mix the blood with milk in the bowl,
now I need to piss into the mixture, according to Granny,

but how can I do that with this goggle-eyed murderer
staring at me? Jesus! Not to mention the two women.
Depart please, all of you, I need privacy and time to pray.
Out they go. I piss like a racehorse. That should do.

Now, the next thing is to lick it on. I stir the mixture.
God, it looks vile! Out, out, please, we must be alone!
I take a firm grasp of the lady's ankle, slap on a handful
and start licking the mixture home. Ooooh, oooh she says.

That should do it! I smile. Yarın daha iyi hissedeceksiniz!
You will feel better tomorrow. She trembles, she smiles.
Bert comes bursting back in to reclaim his razor sword
and the handmaiden hustles the limping Yasmin Nur away.

Wanna wotch that koinda thing, sir, know what I mean?
Get out of my sight you grinning reptile. Go, disappear!
But I knew he was right. Omigod that slim lovely ankle.
I knew I would dream about it, dream of all of her as well.

Eileen was gone and long forgotten. Her and the wee children.
Ireland seemed distant, so very far away in time. Damn your soul,
Shane O Neill, damn your black and murderous soul. I wept.
In a little while I felt only slightly better. We moved into Syria.

And then: Yardım et, yardım et, Genç kız ağrısı vardır!!
Bring her to me. Goat, milk, knife ... slice ... get out! Piss.
The pain is a bit higher now, my knee. Oh, your poor knee?
Let's just see what we can do. Oh, Hakim, nice my doktor!

Don't like the feel avit, mate, not this country arahnd.
I am not your mate. Orright, orright, keep your shirt on!
Bangin that little Circassian bit, then, the boss's little bint?
What the hell has come over you, you little shit?

Oooh, sorry, sorry, boss. Gonna be havin' a bit of a do then?
He's right. We are going to be attacked. All the signs are there.
The pain is moving up beyond my knee, yes, here ... and here?
O Granny you never knew what you were leading me into ....

They came down at first light, as usual, attacks on the flanks,
Bedouin horsemen, misaimed muskets and lots of noise.
I called for a circle, shouted commands, Bert was fast and efficient
and it was only the edges they over-ran, and they threw the heads

at us, the heads of our unfortunate comrades, their tribal way
of putting the fear of God into their enemies. I called for the cannon
which took a time to unload from the spooked braying camels
and then we blew them to bits. A touch of modern warfare.

In the middle of the confusion, before we were sure we would win,
Bert looked at me with a devilish smile and stroked his blade.
I knew of course what he meant. I had fought and done what I could.
I could have done more but I made my way to her tent

for I had but a single thought in my mind if I was to die,
or at least in the last few minutes if I really had to die,
I was going to ... and it turned out she had the same idea as me,
and in the end we did not die but achieved... a separate victory!

But if the Sultan finds out, or if anyone finds out ...
why is Bert, that bloodstained idiot, grinning?

432. The Conversion to Islam of Conor Mac Art (part 4)

2011-05-08T05:16:00.001+09:00

An Comhshó a Ioslam de Conchubhair Mac Airt

October, 1563

Is féidir le fir mór agus is minic a ríthe a bhás tú

'Tis a glorious great thing to be young and alive,
to be in possession of your heart and liver and lungs,
feet and hands, ears and eyes and lips and teeth, and ...
taking a quick glance at the blubbery Yoonix beyond,
some other things as well! Hup, get a move on, Bert,
arse in gear, yeh fat oul bowzy, get a move on!

Orrightorrightfackincominthenainttoi?
Trot, trot me oul' segoshia, earn your bleedin wages!
Wyjess? Wotfackinwygessthenseeinasowyounevah ...
Tut, tut Bertie Boy, you've been stealing me blind,
and look at the belly on you hanging over your belt!
Any lip out of you, and it's back to the galleys you go!

I gave him a kick up the arse by way of punctuation,
for I'd seen the way he'd chopped off heads on the slaver.
I wasn't about to give this murderous little tyke an inch,
for he'd be quick to go back to his lethal practiced ways.
I was his present saviour and he knew it, but even so,
I chained him to the wall each night like a rabid dog.

Being in fine fettle, I gave him another good boot
just to remind him what was what, then went strolling,
very large and wide, shoving all the civilians to the side
with a pleasant smile, benevolent in my yellow pantaloons,
my green crushed velvet jacket all festooned with pistols,
and a great white turban topped with a pink feather.

O God, wasn't I the fine lad, stepping high with a lovely smile?
'Twas a far cry I was from the sheep and the goats of Connemara,
and the way they'd be looking at you, the brown eyes on them,
with their jaws half-hanging down, just waiting for the Latin.
I was a grand scholar of the Latin, but it's the Turkish tongue
I'll need presently, at the stern request of the Sultan Himself!

You have six months within which you will learn our language,
he'd told me in his mildly diffident, cold-eyed manner, after which
you will be required to take an examination. It would not be
in your best interests to fail this examination, you do understand?
I understood him all too well, The Old Boy has a sense of humour.
He plans to let Bert wield the sword if I fail to meet his standard.

God knows it's a frightful bloody language, difficult and perplexing,
every nuance and modification tacked on to the same word root,
but none of the logical clear inflections of the Greek and the Irish.
It's subtle, not a bit like the Bearla (English) which is why fat Bert,
my probable executioner, after fifteen years among these people,
knows only gutter words for drink and whores. The Sultan knows this.

This frightens me. He is a more subtle killer than Shane O Neill, perhaps
more dangerous. A shudder passes over me on this bright sunny day
as I stride along the broad streets in my bright yellow pantaloons,
not the sort of thing (I smile) you'd be doing often in the County Tyrone
where even the sheep and the goats would be looking at you askance!
Here it's the most normal thing. I laugh. Cheer up. It will be all right!

My mammy always said I had a lovely way of soothing people,
even as a wee babby, when I'd be pulling the tail off of the cat
or shoving my sister into the fire. I had a way, she said, of making
evil people smile, so that they'd lose the urge and will to kill me.
That was before I had met mad-eyed Shane O Neill. The very thought
of him frightens me even now, never mind the cold-eyed bloody Sultan!

I had to run off to France because Shane was of a mind to kill me,
but I've already told you of that. Some poisoned words, even though
we'd been together at the court of the pale peculiar English Queen ...
and didn't he move like lightning, as always, and spear one of her lapdogs
with one of his hidden daggers (one of the many they never found)
and drink the blood of the poor squealing beast while looking at her?

He smiled at the Queen all the while, smiling through his red teeth,
and didn't she clap her hands, eyes locked, and smile back at him?
There was a pair of them in it. And I knew in that moment as the chill
froze my ears to my skull, that there would be cruel war between us,
and that I had no safety in Ireland while this madman Shane was alive.
I was on the boat from Galway, later, when his killers came calling.

Following certain events in France, I went to cousin Rodrigo in Spain
for a few healing months on horseback, roving around the estancia,
shared for several quiet centuries in a long entwined family connection.
All this ruaile buaile with the Turks might never have happened
if I'd listened to Rodrigo, and never taken the wine cargo to Sicilia.
But I did, and we were fallen upon by a fleet of Turkish pirates.

The Sultan suddenly calls for me in the morning. Bert! Sah? Coffee!
(This is a most refreshing drink; I think it would taste better with sugar.)
Is this the examination? I'm only three months in, where are my notes?
We hasten away. There are five circles of gates at the Topkapi Palace,
each more closely-guarded than the last. Bert was thrust aside, glowering,
ouside Gate Two, half-hoping ... hoping what? I was escorted inside.

Allah barış, sen genç adam olmak. Sana sağlıklı olacağını umuyorum?
Sire! I answered the Sultan nervously, in a highly polite form of language.
Not at all bad, Conor, but I think you still have some distance to go.
But, Sire, you said six months! ... a languid hand. Never mind that now.
I have something entirely different in mind for you at the moment.
Have you ever heard of an ancient city by the name of Yerushallem?

Yerra-what, Sire? Is ...is this some place you'd expect me to know about?
O, I think I would. We both know, Conor, you were once a Christian.
He smiled an icy smile. My mind started racing, I told myself calm down,
this is not Shane O Neill, Shane would cut your throat and then kiss you,
but ... but this fellow only has to lift his finger and .... a city? Yeru, yerra,
shallem, shalom, what in the name of God is he talking about?

I have a mission for you, said the Sultan. It is of the utmost importance.
I want you to go to this city.

(to be continued)

431. US Forces Murder bin Laden ... Does it Matter?

2011-05-04T02:46:00.011+09:00

Probably not. The arch-criminal who has lurked behind the American state of frustration and psychological alienation from that fifth of the world’s population who follow the religion of Islam is dead. In a way that’s good. The Demon King is dead. That still leaves about a billion people who might not have the same reaction. Americans seem to be happy, waving flags and doing their mindless USA USA chants. That’s what people do when they live in America. Back in the 1930s the Germans used to do the same thing with different flags and different chants, in accordance with pretty much the same set of emotions. The difference is this: if you get politically over-excited overseas you are a nationalist (ever and always a bad thing), but if you get hysterical in America you are praised as a patriot.

So what does it mean? Not much, really.

What has changed? Is Al-Quaeda finished, the whole movement destroyed? The simple answer is no. Bin Laden has been no more than a figurehead for the last number of years. There is no evidence that he was the real planner behind the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban government asked America to prove it back in 2002 and America attacked the country instead. We don’t talk to ragheads.

They were after bin Laden for previous attacks on their embassies in Africa. Was he responsible for that? Yes, more than likely.

Was he an innocent guy? Absolutely not. He was at war with the United States.

Why?

Same stuff again and again and again. There was no secret about it. It’s one thing to disagree with the guy but it’s impossible to say he didn’t make his opinions clear. Nothing was hidden, he came out and said it.

He wanted to restore the Khallifat, the historical Muslim rule over the Mediterranean basin, including southern Spain (the lost lands) but with no sense of what those intelligent tolerant southern kingdoms had actually been all about. He wanted to bring in a Wahhabi blanket over the whole Muslim world, a thing that a lot of Muslims in outlying areas would rather do without. He wanted to impose Muslim rule over the world because Islam was the only true religion. He wanted to reverse the shame of the last two centuries in which European and then American power had overshadowed the Muslim world. He wanted to recreate an idealized world of the past that, historically, probably never existed.

The popular demonstrations and uprisings across the Arab world in the last few months are a total repudiation of nearly every one of bin Laden’s ideas. These are national movements for principles of freedom and democracy, entirely modern in intent, and with no throwback to any thought of an Islamic khallifat. None. Bin Laden remains a bit of a T-shirt hero because he stood up to the West, attacked them (when nobody else had the balls to do so), but very few young and not so young educated people in the modern Arab world believe in the weird old-fashioned world he believed in and wanted to recreate. They don’t. The guy is a hero, sure, in a setting where there are so few heroes to crow about, but he comes out of the 10th or 11th century : an amazing warrior, a shaheed, but not quite what we need now .... the fact that he died in a blaze of gunfire is going to add to his mythical status, his position in the pantheon of Arab heroes, standing slightly to the side of the great Salah-ad-Din: dead heroes are the best kind in every culture. Being dead they're not going to come up with something new, embarrassing, or unexpected.ا

Salah-ad-Din. Saladin. Respect, awe, reverence. Dropped his clogs 800 years ago. A person of great charm and courtly benevolence but at the same time a shrewd and gifted general. He threw the Crusaders out of Jerusalem. This, not surprisingly, is part of the ongoing problem in a deeply unsettled and unstable political culture. Apart from Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) viewed by many in the Muslim world as an apostate, with good reasons for doing so, it's tough to have to go back so many years to find a person everyone can agree to admire.

Next we need to take a look at the knotty question of "justice". President Obama spoke in measured tones in the wake of what was little more than an assassination, a calculated hit. This was better than what we could have expected from his predecessor who would have been punching the air, beaming from ear to ear, recreating his role as a Yale cheerleader. But this was not justice. Justice involves courts and laws, charges laid down, a defence, a judge and a jury. Osama was simply blown away and apparently dumped in the sea. This has nothing to do with justice. It’s just a question of getting rid of a guy you you don’t like. Back in the 1920s the Chicago Mob used to do this all the time.

So where does that place the US government? Hard to say.

Better to bump him off than put him in court? After all, who knows what he might say about CIA connections during the Afghan war. That’s probably why Saddam Hussein was turned over to an Iraqi kangaroo court before he could spill the beans on where the gas he used on the Kurds came from (Germany and the USA) and his relationship with Donny Rumsfeld. Certain things we just don’t need to hear about. The general public will never understand the ins and outs of statecraft, so better not to bother their potentially troublesome little heads.

Osama is gone. Blown away, in fact. I don’t think he was a very good man. He was an exceedingly dangerous character who, directly or indirectly, caused the deaths of a large number of people, most of them Arabs and Afghans. I am not entirely convinced he was the presiding genius behind the 9/11 attacks in the USA but he came out and approved of them in a video and for that reason alone he stands condemned as a killer. When he comes face-to-face with the God he proclaims to believe in, the God he claims to have been acting for ( 'Hello, God.' -- 'Hello, Osama,' : this could be happening right now as we speak) he might come in for a bit of a shock. God will haul off and slap him.

Guardian (UK) Obituary:

430. The Conversion to Islam of Conor MacArt (Part 3)

2011-04-26T21:24:00.006+09:00

An Comhshó a Ioslam de Conchubhair Mac Airt

Saol agus an chiall atá deacair.
Níl an Bás.

September, 1563

I took all the necessary vows

with my tongue held firmly in cheek

and thus became a bashibazouk.

I could see no other way.

From slavery and from chains removed

I became again a proud young warrior

with a devilish assortment of weapons

and, I fear, outlandish clothing.

I must confess I looked rather fine.

I would stop then and again by a mirror

and stroke my fierce moustachios

while striking a fearsome pose.

Restored to my natural position

it did not take me long to visit the docks

and search out that Cockney turncoat

who fell to his knees before me.

I was an officer, he was nothing, I had

a crowd of murderous troops around me

and he fell to whining: Omagawdsofackinsorrysir!

A laugh came unbidden: turns of fate are sweet.

Tell me your name, you frightful English cur!

Muggins, sir, Albert Muggins, sir, Bert for short.

Very well, Muggins, gather your kit,

you are now my valet and personal slave.

I must say he took it rather well. In the weeks

and many months to come he showed rather willing,

with a conscientious tradesman’s air about him,

until the time of his ultimate fatal decision.

One cannot really trust the English, of whatever class,

they bear the canker of the Germans from whom they descend:

in triumph they will murder your wife and children,

in defeat they will sob and groan and hug your knees.

They are dull doughty defenders but not real warriors.

We have seen this time and time again. They win and lose

their many wars, not from audacity, but from simply hanging on,

and this has proved to be wonderfully successful.

The world despises and dislikes them, as if it matters,

for they will never rise above their narrow island confines

nor mount any form of empire, the thought is entirely

ludicrous, beginning with a forthcoming defeat in Ireland.

Shane, if I know him, will bash their bloody brains out,

just as I fear, presently, he would treat my brains as well.

In the meantime I look upon this creature Albert Muggins,

give him a kick up the arse, enforcing our change in fortunes.

He is a weaselly, grovelling, dungbeetle of a creature,

often found in the environs of a London district called Ealing

where ailing grandmothers with coins under their mattresses

need iron bars on the windows to keep their grandsons out.

The Gibbard family of the area are well known for marauding

on the poor and the helpless and orphans and widows,

a greedy ferocious clan of depradations and occasional poetry,

handed down, it would seem, from generation to generation.

Albert Muggins – Bert – took a shine to his duties, crookedly-toothing

his smiles, saying, Tankgawdyewcymealongsirbloodywytingsooiwoz!

Then along before long came the delicate problem of Yasmin Nur:

almond-eyed young second concubine to the Captain of the Guard …

The decipherment process is going on steadily but slowly under the direction of Professor Uchiyama and his team, scraping and dissolving away the cowshit of centuries, but there is a real and catastrophic possibility of a reduction in funds and possible termination of the project owing to the March 11 massive earthquake in Japan. We can only hope the project will continue.

429. The Conversion to Islam of Conor MacArt (part 2)

2011-04-21T11:19:00.003+09:00

An Comhshó a Ioslam de Conchubhair Mac Airt

Creideamh ar ár n-aithreacha,
creideamh naofa !!
Beidh muid fíor dhuit go héag.

August, 1563

There’s not all that much to it, you sad Irish infidel,
said Sullivan the Magnificent, his eyes twinkling.
He was a most remarkable man, of quite small stature,
but of great presence, eyes like a hawk, a mind like a razor.
From the Sirkeci slave market down the hill from the palace
I had been dragged before him in chains, bedraggled,
but considerably cleaned up since the trip from Cyprus.

It was the flute I had brought from dear old Connemara
that had caused hesitation in the hard cruel Turks,
who, like all cruel people, were maudlin at heart.
They cried copiously when drunk, mourned sadly the loss of love,
much as we do in Ireland. And this, I think had saved me
on that hellish bloody voyage after the pirates had taken us
and beheadings had become their daily recreation.

I take it you believe in God, said the Great Sullivan,
which is the only important matter. All the rest is mere
conformity to the customs and habits of the people around you.
I cannot relieve you from your present condition, nor can I
offer you a position and salary, even though I am the Sultan,
the Padmishah, the Ruler of the World, etc., etc., and you
my dear are not undeserving … unless you convert to Islam.

It’s a matter of rationality, he continued, precious little
of which exists in this world. Nevertheless, I tend to believe
you are an intelligent man. Your music is pleasant enough
but there are other reasons I have decided to save you.
I thought of Saint Patrick and the holy martyrs and the priests
and the more I thought of the priests, dirty beggars, the more
I began to listen to what this shrewd old man was telling me.

Religion is a form of celestial politics, a shadow of the real,
it exists in constant opposition to any humanly established State
which much find some accommodation with it to survive.
I stared at the old man, goggle-eyed. What was he telling me?
Although Islam is the true religion, he blithely continued,
I think all religions are no more than regional creations, otherwise
the whole world would have the same beliefs. And it doesn’t.

Conor, he said, not unkindly. You are a stranger in a strange land
(we were talking in Latin, the only language we both understood)
but I may have need of you. You will kindly convert to Islam.
Otherwise you will be of no use to me whatsoever. I will throw you back
whence you came (a steely gaze) and you will not last a week.
Well, that was true enough. The philosophical bit of the talk
shrank down by comparison. I was led away to a scented sleeping chamber ...

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

(The thoughts of our hero are still being deciphered from the recovered documents. Cowshit from the byre in Armagh has its preservative factors but it takes ages and ages to scrape and dissolve it away).

Suleiman the Magnificent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleiman_the_Magnificent
_________________

428. The Conversion to Islam of Conor MacArt

2011-04-19T09:03:00.003+09:00

An Comhshó a Ioslam de Conchubhair Mac Airt

Páris, tar éis an tsaoil,
is fiú go mór Aifreann.

July, 1563

Satisfied, then, you bloody barstid?
said the man, a slip of drool running down his stubbled chin.
The weather is rather cool for May, I carefully replied,
in my newly acquired store of words in the clattering tongue
of the English, distressing sounds designed I believe
to make one's mouth feel unclean. I was aware it was July
and blistering hot, but I did not have the words at the time
to convey my sympathetic meaning. Bloody barstid, satis - THUNK
and his severed head bounced once or twice on the deck,
wild staring blue eyes, the bits of drool quite perfectly in place.
It was extremely well done, no hesitation or nonsense about it.
Fakkyehbleedinahrishkantya!
said the beheading Turk, turban slightly askew, his eyes
half-yellow, half-green gooseberries popping out at me.
The weather is rather cool for May, I informed him.
Wotchitmyteyawannabenekstorwotorright?
I realised the creature was speaking English.
Stonafakkingrowsgeddafahkahyavvit!
he growled at me, slinging me down into the hold below,
where I lingered, shit-stained, hungry and miserable,
for three or seven days, when we came to a place called Cyprus.

One of the things I grew to like about the Turks
was that they either kissed you or killed you,
and although not kissable, not then, they held off
on the killing and drenched me down with buckets of water,
there on the dock, in front of a gaggle of tittering hooded women
accompanied by great big blubbery characters
whom I later learned were known as Yoonix
having had their - their parts removed. I was beginning to think
the Turks could be cruel when they put their minds to the task,
and so I said to myself, I said, don't go playing the eejit.
I managed a courtly smile and an elegant bend of the knee,
rather well done under the prevailing circumstances,
but was brought to sudden order by a slap on the back of the head.
I was to learn you can willy the women to your heart's content,
but you cannot, MAY not talk to them, a rigid rule I was to break
on more than one occasion: Yasmin Nur, my soul, Yasmin ...

Yes, well, I'm getting ahead of myself as we say in Connemara,
where the sheep would be looking at you for forms of religious guidance.
I suppose you might be asking yourselves, and murmuring with your wives,
why a fine young buchaill like myself, a scion of the sons of Ulaidh,
sometime friend and companion to our late great chieftain Shane O Neill,
a gentleman of arts and parts, with pigs and cattle to his name,
(until they were robbed away from me, God blast the black souls),
should be shivering and covered in shit in Cyprus? Shrewd questions.
You will remember from a previous account my cousin Rodrigo ....

Here the manuscript abruptly ends. We are searching for the additional papers found only recently by Professor Takeshi Uchiyama and his team of researchers from Kyoto University, led on by hints in obscure Chinese imperial records. The successful search led to a cow byre in southern County Armagh, formerly a Norman keep of the 13th century, mined until recently by unsympathetic members of HM military forces bravely suppressing the local women and children.

427. The Temporary Exile of Conor MacArt

2011-04-15T09:05:00.004+09:00

Tá an Deoraíocht Sealadach na Conchubhair Mac Airt

An marc an uasal na hÉireann é --
leagann an-bhreá ach neamhaird de bróga

November 1562 - February 1563

It was either murder or the cold shoulder
when one crossed the path of Shane O Neill,
and thus I hurriedly hied me off to France
before the latter became the former

in the twenty-third year of my youth,
with angry bailiffs battering at the door
and my wife Eileen in floods of tears
as the cows and the pigs were driven away

and the children as well, not to be sold
or eaten, or not at once, sent to the cousins
who would happily hold this against me forever
in the way all strongood Irish families do.

It was a joy to speak Latin in France
with the learned men of Louvain and Grenoble,
to discourse on Ariosto and the Nine Commandments,
the fifth never having quite caught on in Ireland

and to have blood-red wine not made from nettles
and cheese not pressed from the udders of goats
as one slipped into one’s weary bed of an evening
warmed by the breasts of the live-in language teacher.

I made remarkable progress in their pouting tongue,
a slurry Latin spoken with fingers and shoulders,
and I rode in the Tuilleries with the haut de haut monde,
they on horses and me, barefoot, on a Connemara pony

for all the world to gaze and wonder and stroke their chins
so that even the King sent his young men to call on me
while that foul evil knave of an English Ambassador
eyed me coldly and sent over a cask of poisoned wine

which put an end to the language teacher, a pleasant wench,
voluble, affectionate, a wee bit too fond of the drop,
and so I decamped thereafter for the shores of Spain,
to cousin Rodrigo and our sunny vineyards in the South.

-----------------------------------------------------------
During the Middle Ages, Galway city in the West of Ireland was ruled by an oligarchy of fourteen merchant families (12 of Norman origin and 2 of Irish origin). These were the "tribes" of Galway. The city thrived on international trade, and in the Middle Ages, it was the principal Irish port for trade with Spain and France. The most famous reminder of those days is Ceann an Bhalla ("the head of the wall"), now known as the Spanish Arch, constructed during the mayoralty of Wylliam Martin (1519–20). In 1477 Christopher Columbus visited Galway, possibly stopping off on a voyage to Iceland or the Faroe Islands. Seven or eight years later, he noted in the margin of his copy of Imago Mundi "Men of Cathay have come from the west. [Of this] we have seen many signs. And especially in Galway in Ireland, a man and a woman, of extraordinary appearance, have come to land on two tree trunks [or timbers?]" The most likely explanation for these bodies is that they were Inuit swept eastward by the North Atlantic Current.

426. The Diplomatic Mission of Conor MacArt

2011-04-10T09:10:00.003+09:00

An Chuairt Taidhleoireachta na Conchubhair Mac Airt
Aisteach go raibh sí agus contúirteacha,
bean le fear éigin eile.

January, 1562

I have a strong dislike for boats and the sea,
bare planks between your soul and perdition,
with wind and the rain adding to the sorrow.

Hours and hours we spent on the ocean
with the cattle moaning in childlike fear below
and myself moaning likewise above them.

We came to Bristol, a town of the English,
a marvellous great city of well-dressed people
very happy and pleased with themselves.

We had horses to hire for the road to London
on the further side of the kingdom, we stayed
at villainous flea-ridden inns all along that weary road.

London, my dear, makes Dublin look like a village
with all its tall houses pushed together, leaning
on one another, its sights and its sounds and smells.

We came to the court, at a place called Hampton,
a sturdy stone palace by the side of the river
and there the Queen came out to meet us.

She is a frail looking woman of middle years,
very white in the face and enormously prepared
in her dress and visage to meet the day.

Very grand did she look but quite kind withal
as her courtiers clucked and fussed around her.
We were asked to leave our swords and axes behind.

The discussion was long and polite but wearisome.
These people do not understand us; I think we
need to prepare ourselves for the coming war.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Not quite entirely fictional since there is a precedent with Granuaile, the pirate queen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_O%27Malley#Meeting_with_Elizabeth
And, somewhat earlier (upon which this poem is based) the visit of Shane O'Neill in 1562:
Accompanied by the Irish Earls of Ormonde and Kildare, he reached London on 4 January 1562. William Camden describes the wonder which O'Neill's wild gallowglasses occasioned in the English capital, with their heads bare, their long hair falling over their shoulders and clipped short in front above the eyes, and clothed in rough yellow shirts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_O%27Neill

425. The Death Poem of Conor MacArt

2011-04-07T15:50:00.000+09:00

An Dán Bás Conchubhair Mac Airt

Tá mo chroí bánú.
I bhfuil cónaí lá fada agus leisciúil.
I mo óige a bhí mé ghaiscíoch,
I meán-aois a bhí mé comhairleoir,
I seanaoise mé díomá.

My heart is fading.
My days were long and lazy.
In my youth I was a warrior,
in middle age a counsellor,
in old age a disgrace.

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

The Japanese warrior class (侍: samurai) had a tradition of writing death poems known as Jisei no ku: 辞世の句, often before committing ritual suicide to expiate some breach of honour. In Ireland, as usual, we do things differently. This is not a translation (well, obviously it has been translated) but a first attempt to write an original poem in Irish. I'm waving at you, somewhat forlornly, before a mountain of outraged pedantry falls down on me .... but not here, I hope.

Link to Jisei no ku (Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_poem

424. Child in Time

2011-04-02T05:39:00.001+09:00

Four-year-old Manami Kon sleeps after writing a letter to her mother, who was swept away by tsunami in Miyako, Iwate Prefecture. The little girl said late last month that she would write to her mother, and spreading a notebook on a kotatsu table at the home of relatives she spent nearly an hour writing: "Dear Mommy, I hope you are alive. Are you well?" Manami's father and younger sister also remain unaccounted for.

Manami chan,
the sea took your mama away

and she lives in heaven now

with dada and your sister.

You are alive, sweet girl,
and I think you may not believe
in life, in your solitary survival,
as the years march on.

People will forget.
They always do.

You will think, many times,
better to have joined them,
to have shared their fate, why,
why should I be spared?

Was there a reason?
Probably not.

The gods of all countries
play dice with human lives,
inhumanly laughing. And so,
Manami, all of four years,
I think you will learn
to dispense with these gods

for they are not needed.

There are people in the world
you do not even know, people
from countries you have
never even heard of, places
like India, Australia, Luxembourg,
Pakistan, Ireland, Sikkim,
whose hearts go out to you.

They will try to send you money,
a thing nice people do, wringing their hands,
willing and useless, wistfully helpless.

Some Americans will try to adopt you.
Be sure to avoid that. Go to school.
Get a job that will help other people,
always stay in Japan. Have children.
Remember your mother.

423. Love, Rain on Me

2011-03-25T09:56:00.002+09:00

When all the flash boys
have departed, packed up their
gutter language and departed the scene,
leaving behind those broken pint glasses,
discarded syringes, used condoms,
I will turn to you, my darling, here
in this graffitti-stricken car park
and speak of Euripides, the man
who foretold it all, the future world
he never lived to see. Your eyes
glaze over, you want to speak of love

as if a man and a woman
can lose themselves in each other
and set the world aside
now and forever.

Suicide, I think,
is one response;
marriage another.

422. Japan Quake (with updates)

2011-03-13T09:53:00.059+09:00

As usual it came along without any warning. I had left the house that afternoon to drive up to the Honda factory where I was teaching a daily intensive. The class was scheduled to begin at 2 pm. My student and I had settled into a tatami room at the Training Center and were 45 minutes into the lesson when the light fixtures started shaking. Soon we could feel the movement rising up through the mats but it didn't seem all that bad at the time. It did go on for quite a long time, though, about 3 or 4 minutes, which in my experience of earthquakes over here was far longer than usual. Generally you will feel a jolt and the movement will last 30 seconds or so. My student and I left the room for the lobby of the building where we immediately turned on the TV. All stations had switched over to emergency reports as they do in Japan: this country experiences something like 20% of all worldwide earthquakes and tremors and their response is immediate. My student made a few calls on his cellphone (the local networks had not been affected) and told me he had to report back to his office, and could I wait for him? He later called to say he would be held up and the lesson was cancelled. I drove home. There were no signs of damage anywhere and the traffic flow was the same as usual.

Back at the house I followed the reports coming through on TV. It soon became apparent that the quake had been a lot bigger than I had realized. Locally the quake had registered as a Level 5 on the Richter scale (which is not all that terrible by Japanese standards) but at the epicentre about 600 km to the north, off the eastern coast near Sendai, it was reported as a Level 8.8 which made it the largest quake ever recorded in Japan since records began about a century ago.

The images coming through on TV made it apparent that the destruction had been massive in areas of the north with fears of a tsunami to come. Casualties in the early reports were placed at 40 people or so, rising later to about 60. It was to get much much worse as the later tsunami reports started to come in.

Casualty reports soon mounted into the hundreds as reports of massive waves along the Tohoku coast came in as well as fires and collapsing buildings as far south as the Tokyo area. Pedestrians in some cities were shown dodging debris falling down from highrise buildings. A nuclear reactor in Fukushima was reported as severely damaged. Police reported recovering several hundred bodies from the coastline near Sendai.

Now several ships have been reported missing as well as four trains that were travelling along the northeastern coastal route. As news continues to come in the magnitude of the destruction and the numbers of those feared dead or missing increases by the hour. This is turning out to be one of the worst natural disasters this country has experienced since the 1995 earthquake that devastated Kobe.

-- Sunday 3/13, 9.52 am

The aftermath of this thing is becoming a very grisly affair for those poor people up in the worst hit areas. Hundreds if not thousands of people are still missing with little hope being held out for their survival whereas something like 200,000 people or more are bedding down in temporary shelters on extremely limited rations of food and water. Shops and other services are basically not functioning. The nuclear reactors are shut down and the electricity grid is severely affected with power from the Tokyo area being redirected up north, hence the Tokyo power cuts. Apart from the human tragedy involved this is a devastating hit on the still very sluggish Japanese economy and rebuilding and recovery will take months, possibly years ... and where some of those coastal communities are concerned, sadly, maybe never.

-- Tuesday 3/15, 9.44 pm

Oh, no! We've just had another one. It was about 30 seconds or so in duration starting at 10.32 local time and it was centred on our area, Shizuoka. It was mild but my God, I'm starting to think this is malevolent. I know, logically, that nature is a blind force acting according to certain rules and conditions, but I'm also thinking that poor old Japan is coming under the hammer.

-- Tuesday 3/15, 11.29 pm

This is a map I have borrowed, in fact stolen, from a friend (with his belated but gracious permission) which shows where we live. We exist and enjoy our generally pleasant social being more or less under the same yellow pin which, as you can see, is quite some distance from where the Friday earthquake struck: (please click on the photo to enlarge)

-- Wednesday, 3/16, 4.52 pm

If you want to help out, and I don't think the currently weak Japanese government is really able to handle this thing entirely on their own, Google has put a donation link to the Japanese Red Cross

Nothing much happening locally. Our area is pretty much back to normal, never actually departed much from normal even last Friday, but the mood is nervous. We had that tremor the other night which wound people up just that little bit tighter than they were wound up before. Foreign friends are talking about leaving Japan, often under pressure from their families at home. Friends from Germany expected next week have abruptly cancelled their travel plans. I can understand all this but don't extend much sympathy. This is a dangerous country (earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, you name it) so if you can't handle that idea why bother coming in the first place? I think of all my Japanese friends, not to mention the handful of people I would gladly see swallowed up by any disaster, natural or man-made, and I also think of the millions of Japanese with family and local roots going back for generations and even centuries. This slinky archipelago off the East Asian coast is their home, for better or worse, and over the years since my initial bumbling arrival when I could barely speak three words of the language, it has become my home as well. My wife is Japanese. My daughter is half-Japanese, a third American, and three-quarters Irish (makes perfect sense) so this is no time to cut and run. This is a time to stick around and do what you can to help. Some of the Pretty People will duck out ... as they always do ... but who cares about them?

Saint Patrick's Day tomorrow -- Beannachtaí na Feile Padraig! -- but no-one's in much of a mood to party. How can you with people half starving and living in tents?

Wednesday, 3/16, 9.15 pm.

The shops have started running out of water, toilet rolls and rice as the city's beleaguered citizens panic-buy and supplies get clogged in the country's transport arteries. Candles, facemasks and umbrellas have sold out too, after government officials advised using them to protect from fallout. "Leave the umbrellas outside your door when you come back home," said one. Many convenience stores have shut their doors after ending up with nothing to sell, a minor but telling sign of the disintegration of normal life in a city where the stores light up almost every street.

-- David Mc Neill, Independent March 16, 2011

This is Tokyo he's talking about, the capital, 90 minutes away by train. He goes on to say that thousands of people are streaming out of Tokyo just to get away from the (worrying) possibility of radiation fallout. People, he says, are carrying umbrellas to keep the radiation off. This is like Alice in Wonderland. Morale in the country is NOT falling apart. Everyone is understandably confused, worried, and thinking about leaving for safer areas. In most cases they stay where they are if their homes and workplaces are still standing and simply carry on as before. Where the hell would they run to, anyway, with the airports closed and many train lines down? Actually, the airports are open again. The problem was you couldn't get to them for several days unless you flagged down a madly grinning taxi driver who could shake you down for 2 or 300 dollars. In some cases the flight would have been cheaper.

The government says the nuclear reactors are under control but in this country everyone is sceptical about government pronouncements. Nobody quite believes them. On the other hand, it could be possible that the government IS telling the truth for a change. That would be an interesting development and I personally believe that they are not lying, for the simple reason that so many people from so many different official and semi-official agencies are involved that it would be impossible to suppress the reality of what is happening. This is an opposition party in power (beleagured from all sides) and not the usual LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, the ruling elite for the last 50 years who were neither liberal nor democratic in any loose definition of those terms and ran the country like a family corporation. These guys lied big time and pretty much all of the time so that the public got used to thinking that governments could never be trusted. A possibly earnest & well-meaning & honest administration like the one we have now could be telling the truth but they are so politically inept that it really makes no difference. The Japanese public are suspicious about any government - albeit in a resigned sort of way. It's quite true that many foreigners are fleeing the capital, often at the urging of their foreign-based companies or families back home.

-- Thursday, 3/17. 2.20 am (get a life, go to bed: no, it's St. Patrick's Day, ye thundering heathen, so I'll have this wee little dram. Good luck to the lads and the lassies, cold and shivering but alive up in Tohoku. Sláinte, mo chairde, and may God be good to you, never mind if you believe in him or not.)

The damn thing goes on: more dead, more missing. I feel so bloody useless. I want to jump on a train and go out and help (doing what, exactly?) There are ongoing transportation problems north of Tokyo. Also, the last thing anyone needs is some eejit like me barging in needing his own portions of food and water when there is not enough food and water to go around. Send money? Been there, done that. What does it mean, though? Drop in the bucket. If a whole bunch of these people come down south looking for food and shelter (no signs of this happening so far) we could probably put up five or six of them in the tiny apartment we live in. Roof over their heads at least and the local stores and supermarkets are still in business, no probs, so plenty of food. Don't know how they'd take to my cooking, though, with this heavy hand on the garlic and chili. See what happens tomorrow.

Yoshikatsu Hiratsuka weeps next to where his mother's body remains buried under rubble in Onagawacho, Miyagi Prefecture, on Thursday morning.

I had to go out to Honda again today for a new class. Talk about deja vu all over again. I had been here when the earthquake hit last Friday afternoon and it was distinctly weird signing in with the same gate guards. The class went well, some poor chap being sent over the the Ohio plant for the next five years, having to leave his wife and three daughters behind. Normal Japanese company procedure. I don't really want to watch television any more. The disaster news goes on and on. Nothing else is on the telly. We're starting to feel earthquake overload, survivor guilt, just a whole load of shite. The thing is, as I said, it just keeps going on and on with no end or relief in sight. After hours and hours of it you go out for a drink with the lads and watch everyone trying to change the subject. We're just not designed to go into permanent grief mode. After a while you simply rebel against it. I know this may sound a bit heartless but put yourself in the same situation. It just won't stop.

Paul, an old friend from my battling JALT days (a Language Teachers national association), contacted me on Facebook. He was in town with his wife whose family comes from this area. They were "refugees" from the Fukushima district where those temperamental nuclear reactors are still bubbling. Their house survived but the ceiling fell down at his workplace. Yo, Bren, St. Paddy's Day ... what's going on? Well, I had an invite to a pub party down in Toyohashi but I had half decided to cancel. Yet disaster overload was taking its toll. Another evening sitting at home watching the news seemed totally repellent. Meet you down at the station at 5, how's that? We did, got the train, found the pub, met some lovely people and had a great old sing-song. There was a ¥500 cover for Earthquake Relief sort of to assuage the fact that we were trying to put the thing out of our minds and have a bit of cheer and human connection. And it was St. Patrick's Day which won't come along again for another long year. God knows what will happen in the meantime. Got home to the right city. Honda again tomorrow.

Thursday, 3/17, late

Several foreign governments are advising their nationals to leave Japan or at least the worst affected areas. The Chinese have already evacuated 6000 of their citizens and the British and the French are laying on special flights. We receive regular e-mails from the Irish Embassy and they stress that they are not advising people to leave other than moving to safer areas if they live in the Tohoku region. They ask people from that area to contact the Embassy if they have not already done so but there are no reports of missing Irish citizens. There are only about 2000 of us in the country and most live in either Tokyo or Osaka. Locally I have heard of about a half dozen foreigners planning to leave or who have left already. All of them were youngish single people with no real ties to the country who probably came under pressure from their families. Click here for a report from BBC News.

Emergency cooling procedures are still taking place at the Fukushima nuclear reactor complex with fears for the volunteer staff who have chosen to remain on duty to prevent the possibility of a massive radiation leak. Click here for a report carried in the UK Independent.

The mood overall seems to be stoic with few signs of panic. People have been evacuating the worst hit areas when possible to stay with friends and relatives further south. Tokyo is bearing up under a series of inconveniences caused by the rolling power cuts and ongoing transportation difficulties but there is little sense of imminent danger. The Japanese have faced both natural and man-made disasters in the past and have always applied themselves to the task of recovery with a sense of dedication and purpose that would be hard to match in most other countries. The country has been dealt a savage blow but it is by no means beaten down and the public seems determined to bury its dead, succour the injured and displaced, clean up the mess and work its way back to a full recovery. The economic consequences of the disaster will be enormous but there is little sense of the country feeling defeated or totally overwhelmed by it. Click here for more on this story.

Saturday, 3/19, 2.20 pm

Life Goes On Department ...

Ireland Thumps England 24-8 in 6 Nations Rugby

Verrrrry satisfying ... !

-- Saturday night/ Sunday morning, 3/19 - 3/20

Daughter Siobhan got back to Japan after her holidays with friends in Hawaii. She was well out of it but naturally concerned until we got through by phone and e-mail. Her flight was redirected to Osaka, she caught the train up and I met her at the station about an hour ago. We sort of fell in one another's arms. She'll be staying for a few days before (maybe) returning to Tokyo on Wednesday or Thursday.

-- Sunday evening, 3/20, 10.40 pm

Life goes on pretty much as normal here and further south. The electricity cuts have hit the northeastern part of Shizuoka but haven't come down to our area. Rescue work is still going on with little hope held out for the approx. 17,000 people still missing while the death toll has risen over the 8000 mark. A young man and his grandmother were found alive in the wreckage of their home after surviving for nine days. The road to Sendai in the north has been sufficiently cleared so that relief supplies are getting in; also several ports have been re-opened so that supplies can come in by sea. The problems at the Fukushima nuclear complex still continue. Many companies are considering halting production lines owing to problems with suppliers and transportation difficulties. My guy at Honda was supposed to pick up his American visa this week but has been told he will have to wait until the end of April or even early May, which seems to indicate that the consular service has shut down or cut down severely on staff. The Hamamatsu Festival has been cancelled for the first time in nearly 60 years - it's a 3-Day extravaganza held from May 3rd to 5th each year and goes back 270-something years. The overall mood is worried but resilient and there is a palpable determination among all the Japanese I have talked with to recover from this tragedy and get the country back on its feet as soon as possible. The outlook now is for months, perhaps even years, of recovery efforts. One local company I was teaching at has had to move in staff from a damaged affiliate company in the north taking up all the conference rooms and extra space so the teaching contract has been suspended indefinitely with some talk of (maybe) resuming in July. That may offer some insight into corporate thinking in terms of a time frame. Some foreigners continue to make plans for leaving, particularly the young and unattached, even if they live in areas such as this which have been hardly affected. Other foreigners are beginning to show signs of irritation if not downright anger at the contrast between the low-key factual Japanese TV news and the hyped-up reports coming through from the foreign media, as the two following local gaijin blogs, HERE and HERE will tell you in no uncertain terms!

-- Tuesday, 3/22, 10.25 pm

Rube, an old friend from those balmy JALT days (not so pleasant, come to think of them, when Gene and I had to push against the grain: poor old Gene is gone, a victim of cancer in 2009 but between us we saved the thing from going under) says don't be so optimistic. He has a point, as you can see from the following two articles:

Assessing death.

What's really going on at Fukushima.

It's not a question of not believing. I don't think it's possible that everyone locally has been lying to us. They couldn't suppress what is going on with all the various people involved in official and semi-official capacities, including the US military.

None of us plan to leave, whatever happens. Even if things get worse there is no way we can run away and desert our friends. Think about it. No-brainer.

-- Thursday, 3/25, 11.40 pm

I met Frankie down at the Schloss and we had a few jars. We talked things over. He says why the fuck do you trust the US military? That's got me thinking. Frank, bless his soul, is Canadian. I point out to him that Canada will shortly disappear off the face of the planet, absorbed by Amerika. He glares at me. He knows it's true. We order two more. The news continues bad: at least 10,000 dead, up to 20,000 missing.

Saturday, 3/26

Been down for the last three days, not feeling so well. It's been a physical as well as emotional reaction to the last few weeks when I found myself talking to dozens and dozens of people, most of whom I'd never met before, drinking in consequence a bit too much. The hang-in-there spirit (allied to a crashing hangover!!)is tremendously strong but the truth is we are all finding it hard to deal with the rising death tolls -- 12,000 now with 16,000 still missing -- and there is an underlying sense of deep depression. We are entirely with the Japanese and have no intentions of running away. Our friends and acquaintances have known that from the beginning. The strangers recently come in touch with (so much more readily open to talk) seem to appreciate it when they hear it. But what are we actually doing, apart from contributing to the Red Cross, and throwing in coins to all the collection boxes that have sprung up nearly everywhere? Not much, unless refusing to leave is a statement in itself.

Wednesday, 3/30

-- Friday, 4/01

421. traditions

2011-03-02T05:32:00.005+09:00

A hidden ancient passage
under these tufts of uneven pasture
leads to a stone-lined tunnel,
uncovered, not by scholars,
but by the local IRA
intent on hiding weapons.

Traps for indigent robbers
have been worn away by decay,
and in the core of the inner sanctum
three large and separate open graves,
lie carefully, reverently surrounded
by treasure and homely objects:

combs and knives,
little personal tools,
for even kings need things
in the Other World.

Under rain sodden fields above,
the generations of philosophic cattle,
and hidden for more than a thousand years:
this golden torc, jewellery, six crumbling swords,
seven exquisite little silver drinking cups
of meticulous execution, shoved off
to the side now by rifles.

420. now I lay me down to sleep

2011-02-17T21:54:00.001+09:00

Careening down the mountain
on the one remaining rail
of the broken railbed,
gathering speed, my arms
spread wide, hunched-up,
tensing for the crash

is when I shudder awake,
many times already,
in this cold white room.

In Hungary, before Trianon,
Nem, nem, soha …
life was likened
to licking honey,
to licking sweet honey
from a thorn.

I have seen the future
and don’t want to go there.
Like a reversing van,
a pantechnicon, very
very slowly backing in.

.......................................

Nem, nem, soha : No, no, never -- the Hungarian rejection of Trianon, the treaty that took away two-thirds of its land and people after the Austro-Hungarian army was defeated in the Great War.

419. poetic language

2011-02-10T23:13:00.001+09:00

Poems, you know
have little to do with fancy language.
There is no need to use
special words which you would
never use in daily speech.

You would not say, 'Hark, the dawn!'
to your mama, nor would you remark
that the raiments of night unfold the stars
as you talk & laugh with the boys,
so why the hell do you do it now?

----------------------------------------
Post-poem:

Keep language simple. You need to keep close
to the smells, and to the brightness and shade,
to the colours, the sublety of changes,
the roughness and smoothness of touch,
to the sudden sound that turns your head,
the tang of the pickles and mustard,
to the shapes and the sudden movements,
the instant flash of a blade, the way time
stops. It does in a crisis. That split second of disbelief
is what military training aims to dispel. And so,
when in a suburban MacDonald's that deranged stranger
slits the throat of your companion, just like that,
you shoot him (American version), or you knock him
on the head (European version) and call the police.
The police come in and put up crime-scene ribbons;
the colours may vary, but this is what they do.

So, anyway, you don't proceed or glide down to the Mall.
You go there. You don't partake of light refreshment,
you have a coffee, a snack, or lunch. Likewise, you don't
'sincerely' regret the effects of collateral damage, you admit
you've killed hundreds of innocent women and children.
Language can be dangerous, misleading, often a total lie,
in the sense that verbal markers completely lose their meaning
when connections are lost to the things they describe.
I am no great fan of 'heightened' language, I have seen too much
of it put to abuse. Elections, for example. I would say to young poets
(and to the older ones, also) that there is no need for any special
poetic language, and that it is generally better, ever and always,
to employ the demotic, to write in the way you think and talk.

418. A Japanese Poem in the Chinese Style

2011-01-26T11:20:00.002+09:00

Winter winds

invade from the north

scouring and blasting

the inner walls, rocking

the heavy dark posts

of the temple gate

Last summer

under cicada sounds

and falling blossoms

we sat apart on green

tatami mats, sipping

fresh new tea from Uji

You have gone

to Tokiwa in the north

to the home of your uncle

and I have gone

in duty, as I told you

far south to Kagoshima

Many many leagues

separate our dwellings

and there are no more

blossoms, nor tea from Uji

but the moon understands

and smiles upon us both

417. overseas

2011-01-21T12:29:00.001+09:00

Great-grandma (Baby Doo) stayed in her cabin
all the way to Le Havre, she was feeling poorly,
little darlin, while the boys in their navy-blue blazers
drank the goddam bars dry, thank the Lord they brought
some bottles of bourbon: these English yoicks
didn’t know what happened them. Har-har.
Damn won the war and lost the peace, stiff as penguins,
frozen rabbits caught in headlights. All them
Europeans look pretty much the same, have to say,
dessicated bunch of flightless flapping parrots.
Damn right I’ll have another drink.

Darkness at sea under stars
is one of the finest things I know.

Baby Doo got sick on the train to Paris,
threw up all over Barbara Wainwright, who smiled
in a testy Quaker way, East Pennsylvania, and said,
My Lord, I should have opened that window,
but they all just damn well laughed, and she felt,
not for the first time, virginal, foolish, set apart,
alien and separate from her fellow Americans,
like Virgil who was playing with the zip on his pants
and Amelia who was lifting her skirts too high.
It was all very strange and unsettling.

I’ll be happy when I get to Paris, she thought,
far away from these clowns, deep into a world of culture,
and then at last I will be free. No more Mama and Papa
leaning heavily down on me. I need to write to my sister
who hates and loves me in agony and young resentment.
This strangely gives me strength. Virgil seems to have
a cucumber behind that zip but I turn my eyes away,
sort of, is this what it is really going to be like? My
God, do I really have to get married and … allow it?
I can’t live alone, not really, so this penetration, this
unwelcome violation is going to happen and come to me?

I want to be a young girl forever without any damn silly man
here in Paris and Europe for the first and last time, and, maybe,
who knows, I might die. It’s very fashionable to die young,
but I’m not too sure about it. It seems a bit dark and final.
I might pretend to die for a bit so that people get worried,
but it costs a lot, and my father will complain about the bills.
He’s a red-faced burly businessman and he scares me to hell
but I know he loves me and will throw money all over me
while my mother looks on from behind, tight-lipped and silent
and my young sister, dancing in frustration, glares.

Within twenty-four hours of arrival I am ashamed to confess
I have been violated, not once but two or three times, vigorously,
by a young artist and I confess I enjoyed it. Of course he is American,
from a rather good family, not one of the natives, from Philadelphia,
he says he knows some of my cousins. Between physical bouts
we talk about family trees. He is terribly misunderstood, poor boy,
and I feel it is my duty to gather him into the arms of Home, as only
a Real Woman can do. I am rather enjoying my role as a Real Woman
since it is new and feels rather nice among the sights and smells
of this strange, uxurious, and scented spreading city.

Home, home, home, little boy. I'll break you,
take you home to Murrica soon as I can.

416. Kristallnacht

2011-01-19T01:17:00.001+09:00

As rude armed men

shatter the windows,

my cat, forever

feminine, dreams of food

and simple affection.

She leaps upon the page

in want of both,

here and now.

A separate arrogance

lies behind these

eternal scribblings,

I say to the cat, as I

stroke her softness,

hide the parchment,

then head for the door

for what will follow.

415. na Gile an bhróin (the lightness of sorrow)

2011-01-14T10:43:00.003+09:00

My blue-eyed beautiful gorgeous mam
dragged three kids through wartime Britain
in search of our father Liam, her demon lover,
lost on some jagged wind-blown building site,
and quite definitely not fighting for anybody,
unless, fair enough, for himself. Historically, you could
award a few points had he not deserted his hysterical
Kerry woman, me mam, a power unto herself,
dragging us through sleet and snowstorms to the next town,
Bradford, Leeds, or some other frightful Midland kip
where news had recently been heard. The day
we came into Coventry the Germans flattened it
and me mam took that personally. They were after Liam,
she said, and he fooled them. They nearly didn’t
feckin fool us, I was about to tell her, gazing around,
but she was never one to listen to peripheral stories.
Lucy, my sister, came down with a cold which got worse
and when she went and died of pneumonia in Yorkshire
I thought me mam would go demented, but she buried
her instead at the side of the road in the loose soil
and me brother Hugh and meself had to say three Hail Maries
for, mam said, the eternal repose of her soul. I missed Lucy.
I was worried about Hugh as well, never mind me mam,
who was away on her own, away with the fairies.

At the end of the day, many days in recollection,
didn’t we come to a stop in Scotland, in Edinburgh,
in some dank little kip up in the Old Town, sliding
precipitously off a cliff from their bloody High Street
where the mam took in washing, brought in, strangely,
by broad-beamed gentlemen with drinkflushed faces.
Hugh and I were then urged to run off and play among
incomprehensible hostile local lads in short trousers
who beat the crap out of us until we learned to fight together,
suborn allies, bully the weak, ingratiate the strong,
absorbing all the indelible ways of dealing with people
that served us so well in the yet-to-come IRA.
Hugh took to it like a duck to water, he’s still standing
at the right hand of Gerry Adams, having traded in his overalls
for Armani suits and trips to Brussels and Amsterdam.

Me, I fell in hopeless love. Her name was Jenny Armstrong
from the local bakery, weak in her health, strong in spirit,
and we had a delicate thing, she taught me about books
and we went to the theatre and opera together (OK, only once)
and we kissed once or twice but we never went much further
before she died on me. She was 16 when she left me alone
and I thought my life had ended. The business in Norn Iron
had just about started, the Brits were after sending the Army
and it was my young brother Hugh persuaded me to go over.
He seemed to know them all on the Catholic side, a term which was
never used, you were trained to say ‘Nationalist’ or ‘Republican’
but we knew it was all the same thing. No bleedin poor Proddy
would ever dare stick his nose in the door, not down in Ballymurphy
where young Adams (3rd generation) ran the show like Napoleon.

It was a war, sort of. People really did get killed on a daily basis
but an awful lot of it, to be honest, was sheer noise and propaganda.
You went out with your Armalite (thank you, America!) and had a few
clear shots at the Brits, and they’d shoot back, but the most of it
was nasty political shite, tit-for-tat assassinations, bombings,
euphemistic justifications (on all sides) for sloppy or clinical murder.
I got sick of it. They can sense that; before long I could expect
my own people to be coming after me, torture, interrogations,
because their greatest fear was informers. Brother Hugh was aware,
now cheek-by-jowl with the Army Council, the highest of the high,
getting me shipped off, this really happened, on a mission to America.

(Background, skipping over the boring bits: Leaving aside the gobsmacking fact that the only possible solution to the conflict was political, the leadership continued to seek military victory. One plan was to bomb the hell out of the major banks in the City of London. No need to kill innocents (the bombs went off at night), just gut the British financial centre and destroy international confidence in the country. This nearly worked: it definitely brought the Brits to the talking tables. The second thing, locally, was to destroy aerial reconnaisance and the British Army's quick deployment of troops to firefights: in other words, shoot down helicopters. The Afghans had used hand-held Stinger missiles to tremendous effect against the Soviets and our lot, basically, planned to do the same. Time to go shopping in America.)

America! Oh, God, you have no idea what it was like.
Five war-torn Paddies get off the plane at Kennedy
and run into a cheerleader screen of Irish-Americans
who think we are still fighting the Black and Tans!
They are two, maybe three, generations behind us:
they don’t fuckin know, they don’t care, but sure as hell
they will put their money down. We know we need it.
What follows is a strange peculiar game, because the people
who want to throw their homes open to us, make speeches,
have us appear at their local social clubs, talk about Ireland,
don’t have a clue about what we are doing. They are pillars
of the Irish-American community, and we are modern warriors,
rebels if you like, terrorists (according to the British),
and have already attracted the attention of the FBI. Not good.

Those weeks in New York were giddy, convivial, surreal.
I remember going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
alone, just to look at the paintings. A guy sidles up
then quickly slips away; another guy barges in, flips a badge,
says, “who were you talking to?” Fucked if I know.
Shopping for deadly missiles is not as easy as you think.
First, who can obtain and sell them? How to get them over?
The Irish-Americans, obviously, were clueless. The thing
with them was to get the money we needed, say, 200 thou,
either from Noraid or from local donations. Noraid was
stand-offish. They believed in helping widows and orphans
no matter what the Brits have said about them since.
They didn’t help. So we got in touch with criminal elements.
Criminals will supply anything as long as you pay them.
This is one of the things you can really count on in life.
They will try to cheat you, sure, but once threats are understood,
a deal, more or less, will generally go through. So we negotiated
and got a good deal going for about 400 factory-fresh missiles
but you know what happened next. The FBI were all over the scam
and we got out by the skin of our teeth. Through Mexico.

Upon reflection, I decided to stay in Mexico for a bit,
working hard on my Spanish, in Chiapas. Brother Hugh
seemed to encourage these language aspirations, hinting
that further undocumented travel was possibly advisable
and that an early return to Ireland might not be the best
idea in the barrel. Since when I have not been home more than
seven times (Ireland, Jayz, do what you like) and, recently,
don’t feel the need. Hugh’s on his way to becoming Taoiseach.

Mammy’s off in a home in Beaumont, she’ll be 93 next March.
She keeps talking to a person called Liameelucy.

414. Mrs Poole

2011-01-10T14:57:00.000+09:00

Hang on, Mrs Poole, and you'll be all right,
as the building crashes down in showers of dust
around you and you are, like, somewhere in there, and I
have to say I never liked you much Mrs Poole, for you were
a right screechy bitch, when me fambly and me
came down for the holidays.

Oh, so you're dead now. They'll be giving you the Albert Medal
posthumously. So very sad. HA! But I want to be sure
you are really really dead: I can see you coming back again
as a ghost, something not too far away from you ....

The worst possible facet of failed communication
is murder, face to face. But it has its place and time.

I step out into the narrow thronged alleyways, sure
of my way. Canals, canals. It doesn't take that long to learn
the ways of this city, the water taxis, no, I can walk,
I can walk, but the matter of escape is a different thing.

There is no escape.

The Furies they can come roaring after me
times, times, some day they will find me
either here or there, it doesn't matter.

413. The Act of Succession

2011-01-04T19:41:00.009+09:00

Sophie von der Pfalz, later Electress of Hanover, painted by her sister c. 1644

Few people know or even care that no Roman Catholic can become the King or Queen of England, and by extension, the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and by further extension, since the British monarch still remains the Head of State, the Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There might even be a few smaller dependencies, colonies and territories thrown in there:
Crown Dependencies
Isle of Man
Channel Islands: Baliwick of Jersey, Baliwick of Guernsey (includes Guernsey and its dependencies)
Overseas Territories
Anguilla
Bermuda
British Antarctic Territory
British Indian Ocean Territory
British Virgin Islands
Cayman Islands
Falkland Islands
Gibraltar
Montserrat
Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands
St Helena and St Helena Dependencies (Ascension and Tristan da Cunha)
South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands
Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia
The Turks & Caicos Islands

These are the last little pink bits scattered over the globe from the once farflung British Empire, mainly in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic, although Gibraltar and Bermuda stand out as historically significant.

So what, and who cares?

Well, Catholics. All those who might happen to live in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, not to mention all these other areas listed above. It's a bit of a smack in the gob to be told the religion of your birth if not your out-and-out allegiance is such anathema to the home country that your King or Queen has to avoid it like poison. If any member of the royal family even marries a Catholic, they get bumped from the Line of Succession:

Since the passage of the Act of Settlement, the most senior royal to have married a Roman Catholic, and thereby been removed from the line of succession, is Prince Michael of Kent, who married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz in 1978; he was fifteenth in the line of succession at the time of his marriage. The current most senior living descendant of the Electress Sophia who is ineligible to succeed due to the act is George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, the eldest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who married the Roman Catholic Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988; he would have been 25th in the line of succession if he had not lost his place. His son, Lord Downpatrick, converted to Roman Catholicism in 2003, and is the most senior descendant to be barred as a Catholic himself. More recently, Peter Mark Andrew Phillips, son of Princess Anne, Princess Royal, and eleventh in line to the throne, married Autumn Kelly; Kelly was a Roman Catholic, but converted to the Anglican faith prior to the wedding. Had she retained her Catholicism, Phillips would have forfeited his place in the succession upon their marriage.

Excluding those princesses who have married into Catholic royal families abroad, only one member of the Royal Family (i.e., with the style Royal Highness) has converted to Roman Catholicism since the passage of the act: the Duchess of Kent, wife of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. The Duchess converted to Roman Catholicism on 14 January 1994, however, her husband did not lose his place in the succession, as the Duchess was an Anglican at the time of their marriage. (source:Wikipedia)

How did it all get started?

It goes back to the Reformation in Europe and the split between the Old Church (unquestionably corrupt, but later to reform) and the protesters, i.e. Protestants, the most famous of whom was Martin Luther in the early 1500s. There had been earlier protest movements before him particularly that of Jan Huss in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, in the 1400s. In England the monarch Henry VIII was initially supportive of the papacy. If you look on your British coins today you'll see the notation "D.F" after the monarch's name which was a papal title accorded to Henry as Defender of the Faith (Defensor Fidelio, or some such in Latin, same initials). Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon (Spain) but she couldn't give him a male heir. After years of trying they had only one daughter, Mary. Henry met a fine young piece called Anne Boleyn, probably had his way with her, and then decided to replace his aging wife with this young and "fruchtbar" (fruitful) little pillow pal so that their subsequent children (preferably male) would be "legitimate" and thus in line for the throne. This is the business of kings: fuck like rabbits and fight like lions, ensure the succession and wage winning wars, or in the case of the Habsburgs, fuck and flee, run away to live and fuck again. Unfortunately for Henry, Catherine had major connections since her nephew was Carlos V, the Emperor of Spain, and no way was the Pope going to offend such a major player. He turned down Henry's application for a marriage annulment. Henry in a rage broke with Rome and started his own national church, the Church of England, and married his sweetheart anyway. Thus did the Reformation come to isolated England:

Henry VIII in better times and the young Anne Boleyn

O the regal Church of England

in all its pomp and state,

celebrates a firm foundation

on the balls of Henry Eight.

In the event, Anne only gave him another daughter (the redoubtable Elizabeth, probably the finest queen England or any other land has ever seen) and after a while he got rid of her in favour of another woman. I think a form of madness came over him because he executed Anne and two more of his subsequent petrified young wives. By now he was a violent obese gouty stinker raddled with disease. His last wife outlived him. Mary, his daughter by Catherine, succeeded him as Queen and tried to turn the clock back to Catholicism. She went in for burning "heretics". She died and the young Elizabeth whose life had been in great danger during Mary's reign became Queen of England in 1558.

Elizabeth and the Stuarts

Elizabeth I, reigned 1558-1603

Elizabeth was a Great King ("with the body of a woman") who saw off threats from France and especially from Spain -- the Armada of 1588 -- and who oversaw a burgeoning political and cultural renaissance in England. This was the era of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare, and also of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. Trade increased and new colonies sprang up in the New World. Elizabeth oppressed the hell out of Ireland, the bitch, in order to close the Catholic backdoor to the French and Spanish (an early example of geopolitics) but she was fascinated by court visits to London by the pirate queen of Munster, Grannuaile, and by the dramatically handsome, and seen from Irish eyes, reptilian Shane O'Neill. Her last years in power were spent in a lengthy war in Ireland against Shane's nephew Hugh which after nine years her forces eventually won thanks to the incompetence of his Spanish allies. Click HERE for link.

Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who led an Irish war against England from 1594-1603

Elizabeth never married -- The Virgin Queen -- so the succession went to James VI of Scotland upon her death in 1603, a connection through her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, whom she had signed off for execution along the way albeit not without reason. This brought the Stuarts into power. James VI of Scotland became James I of England and is best remembered for the King James Bible. By all accounts he was a crotchety bad-tempered bisexual who persecuted Hugh O'Neill (see above) after he fled to Europe, but to little effect. His son Charles succeeded him in 1625.

James VI of Scotland and later James I of England, son of Mary, Queen of Scots

Charles got his head chopped off, the only English king to have managed that feat so far. He antagonized the Parliament to such an extent that a civil war broke out. He lost and was tried and executed in 1649. His sons Charles and James fled to France where they were succoured by the young Louis XIV, then dependent on his advisor Mazarin. England underwent an Inter-regnum under Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentary army. Theatres were closed and the Jews were allowed back into England. Cromwell pacified Scotland and massacred about one-third of the population of Ireland. His reign comes under mixed reviews. He died in 1658. By 1660 Parliament was prepared to restore the monarchy under strict guidelines.

Charles II, son of the beheaded Charles I, who was restored as king in 1660

Charles II was restored as the King of England in 1660. Parliament now held the upper hand but the intent was to create a form of post-civil war reconciliation. Partisans of both former sides found their way into government. The theatres were re-opened and upper class society went a bit mad. Charles himself was a gay blade fathering something like 11 children and not a single one of them with his wife, a sad little Portuguese princess. He gave all his royal bastards titles of one kind or another and the late Princess Diana is a direct descendant from Charles and one of his mistresses. The Royal Society was formed under his patronage in 1662 and attracted some of the finer scientific minds of the period including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton and the astronomer Flamsteed. There was a great plague and a great fire in London in the mid 1660s and Sir Christopher Wren went about rebuilding much of it, including the present day St. Paul's Cathedral.

Charles died without legitimate offspring in 1685 and his brother James (James II) took over. James was a Catholic. The civil war puritans were horrified by this and so were many of the new commercial classes, now formed into a political faction called the "Whigs". The landed classes and old aristocracy who had supported the monarchy in the civil war were now known as "Tories". James could reckon on Tory support but was hated by the Whigs. When in 1688 his wife gave birth to a male heir the Whigs decided to act against him. They called in the Protestant Stadtholder or Leader of the Dutch Republic, William of Orange (who was married to Mary, James' daughter, thus his son-in-law) to replace James as King. William accepted. One wonders what Mary had to say. James fled to Ireland where he hoped to drum up support among the majority Catholic population -- for which he had done very little since coming to the throne. William chased after him and at the Battle of the Boyne (July 11, 1690) King Billy's Dutch and English troops delivered a crushing defeat that sent James (Seamus the Shit, as he is still known in Ireland) hightailing it off to France, leaving the Catholics of Ireland to endure punitive and irrational Penal Laws that lasted until the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832. These laws were the model for Hitler's Nuremberg Edict against the Jews in 1935. (Click HERE for a quick runthrough of Irish history from the Normans to Michael Collins.)

James II, younger brother of Charles II, a Catholic, deposed as king in 1688

William of Orange became William III of England. His wife Mary died in 1694 and he died himself in 1702. No children. Stories abound he had an eye for the young lads. Mary's younger sister Anne became queen. Her only son had died and she was old and ill. She died without issue in 1714. What to do next?

What happened next and why

James II sitting over in France was definitely out and so was his son, also Catholic. His grandson later attempted a romantic comeback through Scotland in 1745 ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") but the poor Highlanders who supported him get knocked to bits by the Duke of Cumberland's cannon at Culloden. In the meantime, Parliament looked for good Protestant successors to the Stuart line and came up with Sophie, the granddaughter of James I, who was married at the time to the Elector of Hanover in Germany. Sophie died but her daughter's husband, a chap called Georg Ludwig, got the nod and was invited to become the new King of England. The Whigs were all for it and the Tories basically knuckled under in spite of some lingering ("Jacobite") support for James. The New Regime took over and their descendants became the British Royal Family of the present day. During World War One, owing to rabid anti-German sentiment, they changed the family name to Windsor. Big deal. The terms of the Act of Succession are still in effect. No Catholic can become the King or Queen of England to this day.

From time to time there has been debate over repealing the clause that keeps Roman Catholics or those who marry Roman Catholics from ascending to the throne. Proponents of repeal argue that the clause is a bigoted anachronism; Cardinal Winning, who was leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, called the act an 'insult' to Catholics. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England, pointed out that Prince William, "can marry by law a Hindu, a Buddhist, anyone, but not a Roman Catholic".^[9] Opponents of repeal, such as Enoch Powell and Adrian Hilton, feel that it would lead to the disestablishment of the Church of England as the state religion if a Roman Catholic were to assume the throne. They also point to the fact that the monarch must swear to defend the faith and be a member of the Anglican Communion, but that a Roman Catholic monarch would, like all Roman Catholics, owe allegiance to the Pope. This would, according to opponents of repeal, amount to a loss of sovereignty.

In the 2005 British general election campaign Michael Howard promised to work towards having the prohibition removed if the Conservative Party gained a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In any event, the election was won by the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, who made no moves to change this law, despite his own conversion to Catholicism after leaving office.

In 2008 plans drawn up by Chris Bryant were revealed which would end the exclusion of Catholics from the throne, and end the doctrine of cognatic (male-preference) primogeniture, in favour of absolute primogeniture, which governs succession solely on birth order and not on sex.^[12](source:Wikipedia)

412. The Flowing Tide

2010-12-30T23:47:00.003+09:00

Whaa yez ffff (cough) loo-lookin aa?
Tink oi’m fff-tin st
range, like? B—b-bowsy. Yer m-m-mother
dropped her draw- (cough) fff’n drawers
in Henry Street, a ho-(gasp) holy show
she was affter maykin
of hurrshelf.

Dartry grasps the situation
immediately, strides up to the autistic
albino leper, takes him by the shoulder
companiably, and shoots him in the head.
The bar staff lift him out, resignedly,
and give him a heave into the yard,
(now designated the Smokers Corner)
among the other restful corpses.

I understand you’ve been misbehaving
says D, raising a quiet two fingers
and we have to wait for the usual 5-6 minutes
while the muddy brown shite does its thing
and comes out a black and glistening Arthur G.
Such tales are exaggerated. Don’t mind me
but did you really have to go and shoot that eejit?
Overall, yes, I went to school with his brother.
Oh, right. Why would you not think

about politics? You have the makings,
guns that work and a pile of queer money,
the history of our beloved ancient country,
and you’ve only to shoot the poor gobshites
that get in the way, two minutes before
they haul off and shoot you instead.

A cute little precis of the Tan War, says D,
and what were you about in Norn Iron?
Nowt, says I, only business as feckin usual
and since when have you had the ghra mo chroi
for Presbyterians? There’s not much of a laugh
in them, says D, musingly, dour motherfuckers
like they’d had pickles for breakfast, ready
to throw their dying Granny off the bed
to get at that last hidden penny.

Our fellow countrymen. We pause and think.
Thank Christ we don’t live in England, anyway.
Do you know what they call James the Second,
says I, apropos of nothing, James the Wha, says D?
Second, never been a Third. Came over here
and got his arse kicked royally on the Boyne
up by Duleek where they have the new bridge.
Oh, I know that bridge, says D, it’s nice, so it is,
and I’m not such a goner on modern architecture
but that is a fuckin nice bridge. It’s got a nice
airy character to it, says I, floating over the river
where all that historical shite went down.
What historical shite, asks D, a typical modern
Irishman. Well, to cut things short they called him
Seamus the Shit. Who? Never mind. He died in France.

I wouldn’t mind going to France, and I don’t mean
just the Duty-frees in Dunkirk and Boulogne
but the real heart of the country, like, la France Profonde,
where nobody speaks English. Lookit, nobody
speaks English in France, period. They won’t issue
you a passport if you even give a hint of speaking English
and if you pretend to understand that bastard tongue
they’ll cut your garlic ration for the next ten years.
That bad? Believe it. How do they get on in the world?
They don’t. They’ve been fading out for centuries.
Au revoir! Une last goodbye. A finally finally last good byeee!
The fuckers can never get off the stage. A bit like us, so?
No. We are a teensy-weensy bit aware of our own shortcomings.

Do you not like our Gallic cousins, ancestral Celts and the like?
I love them to bits. They have style and panache and joei de vivre
that allows the rest of us to get on with life while they prance about
like idiots. Well, then, what about the Germans? Do NOT get me
started!! Whaa yez ffff (cough) loo-lookin aa? Tink oi’m fff-tin st
range, like? B—b-bowsy. Yer m-m … says a rough but familiar voice
and we are rejoined by a large looming figure from Smokers Paradise.
Jayz, you were a long time having a puff, Jim.

411. Haka

2010-12-29T03:22:00.007+09:00

Train train a sky of blue,
a winter morning crisp and tight
like ice, like trouser creases.

My heart lifts, it rises,
as I head off in the wrong direction
looking at the hard-etched houses
lined against an azure sky,
viewing the sharpcut yellow stubble
of a tiny rice meadow
that can feed five families
angled between two rather squat
office buildings with a flourish
of Chinese characters.

The return train,
it seems I am running late
and I couldn’t care

less. The fellows are still
waiting for the stadium bus,
knocking back tinnies at the stop,
and then there is Aya, a sad Filipina
with purple contacts and a helluva
bad story. I have heard so many of them
that I feel like a hidden priest, perhaps
I should parade in rough Christian robes
to hide the ice within.

I could learn to like Aya,
trouble is Aya's been "liked" before,
repeatedly, been badly done over

and so I’m only half listening,
as you do, politely. Then the match
begins, and it goes on for a bit,
with oohs and aahs from the crowd.
I used to love this stuff, this rugby,
in my young youth I played on the green
lumpy fields of three continents,
one of the gay silly things I did
before old age took over.

Rugby, savants say, is a metaphor
for war, for the playing fields of Eton:
untrue, but it can be physical chess

when the many healthy resplendent lads
stop fussing around a badly bouncing ball,
with their girls all bright and smiling, pretending
an interest they could never conceivably possess
in the furthest tiniest re-cess of their capacious
rapacious female brains. Aya is looking over
now, and I'm sorry, but I'm not looking back. I am
on the track of an over-priced fizzy beer; if a man
won’t drink, he could be labelled an Irish queer

for trailing the ladies instead of the booze.
No, no, for all of my life I've been looking, searching,
waiting to choose, hope sadly slipping away.

I reckon in the end we all may lose,
even in the hardass canyons of the USA
where rugby, I presume, is a pussy game.
We had a joke going, one of them weak no-brainers,
as the pink-cheeked girls, annoyed, yanked off their boots,
figure that one out; but then Shem tapped me
upside the head. Fuckin hurt, too. Didn’t even
know the gentleman, a situation soon
and forever about to change.

Stick out your tongue. Wha’?
More, more, more, is that the best you can do?
Was I talking too much? Glaarh --; glaa...aaarh!!

Roll your eyes: flex your knees and elbows,
Jesus Christ, man, are you bleedin paraplegic?
and what happened that tongue, that tongue,
it should be licking the end of your pimply nose!
The fuckwit silly losers they send me down
these times would wear the balls off the Virgin Mary
had she had any, beggin yer pardon, Ma'rm. Sir? What?
Can I stop licking my nose and go back to the crap
daily rhythms of ordinaryl life? Ho, Irish are we?

Limber up, Paddy, for I’m going to teach you once,
once and once only, for the first and for the last time,
how a man should feel, how he should live ... and dance!

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

The Haka is a Maori war dance. The New Zealand rugby team performs it before every international match to intimidate their opponents. It works.

410. Julia, Liverpool, 1924

2010-12-27T15:01:00.008+09:00

I cannot live in this life
in the shadow of me ma and me da,
if it’s only for the shame of it;
I’ve no wish in the world to get married
to some clappety eejit from the bank
or some chap in a solid company
stroking his silly moustache.

I’d rather run off to Arabia
or race away to India and get caught up
with one of them dusky princes.
I spend a lot of time at the films, I do,
my job is to play at the piano, to fit
the music to what the actors be doing,
and I’m awfully good at it.

I love England, actually I don’t,
this country gives me a headache.
I wish I was away somewhere, far away
on a romantic wonderful weekend with some
marvellous, marvellous man
and me ma says that will never happen.

Watch out for sweet-talking men, she says,
they be only out for the wan thing.
Jesus Christ, ma, so am I!

409. The Hidden Meaning of World War Two

2010-12-19T12:57:00.003+09:00

Poor grandmama, she passed away
at the age of ninety-something,
leaving behind a house full of memories
upon which the family shortly descended
like circling crows, squabbling over
the paintings, her gewgaws, the furniture.

There was a darkly glowing Vermeer,
two Rembrandts, some Hepplewhite consoles,
and two whorls of canvas that were not altogether
but almost Turner. Also a Constable.
I came down in a taxi from the station.

Sad that the old lady’s gone, said the driver,
She were a good ‘un, I well remember her
from the First Do: Faith and Freedom.
And were you in that War yourself, I innocently asked,
and he growled and spat, said he'd been thrown
into capitalist wars throughout his fuckin life.

A touch aggrieved, I held back on a large tip,
thinking of my two dead uncles from the first show,
but when I stepped out of that car I had no idea, let me tell you,
of all that stood before me, hunched over in my tailored uniform,
owlishly peering: I was no soldier, no real bayonet-thrusting

Godblastyou crazy person. The Regular Army, in my view,
were gentlemen, not warriors, encompassing a collection
of grumbling commuters plucked from cosy civilian jobs, resigned
to typing the shit out of the enemy, in triplicate. Would you
kindly wait until you are called? Silence, please, and some decorum.

The tanks rolled over the charred steppes of Asia,
the bodies burned in Treblinka and Maidenek,
and all the while motorcycle messengers farted
and backfired into Bletchley Park, where we typed
and typed and, in a British way, quietly won the war.

408. Murakami

2010-12-11T12:07:00.000+09:00

Knew this guy was around, had heard about him,
but never got around to reading him until now.
All has changed thanks to audiobooks dot com
and long boring drives to companies in this area
where I fight against the banks by teaching English.

No, no, it’s cool. Send no money, relax.

Thinking. Even trying not to think
takes time. Time comes down, comes
tick-tick-ticking, bong-bonging on the hour
and seems placidly set to go on forever, maybe
even beyond: tick-tick. Bong.

Silence.

Stars will still shine when you are dead
having sent out their incontinent pulses of light
when your great-great grandaddy, equipped
with the coarse peculiar clothing of the time was doing
something shameful behind that hedge.

It’s all right. The stars see nothing.
They are supremely self-absorbed,
they are galactical Hindus.

There is us and then there is everyone else
ran the cosy accepted Japanese view
before Murakami drove a truck through it.
He should be arrested like Julian Assange
for this blatant display of sad soiled linen

(in which ordinary people come out looking pretty good.)

The thing about Japan you need to know is that
everything works, but you don’t know how it works,
and you’re not encouraged to ask: the buses and trains
run perfectly, so do all the shops and services,
as the government strains to produce consumer heaven
pointing at all the pink and yellow balloons in the sky
while sitting on the lid of a seething stink-ridden cesspit
of foul forbidden secrets. Ho, ho, says Murakami.

I love the casual way he goes about it.
He plays a subtle game with Japanese society,
setting up a number of running parallel stories
about everyday life in very flat and easy, almost bland language.
But then the stories becomes stranger, more menacing,
and the themes coalesce. The manically suppressed
secrets of a wound-up anal-retentive nation spill out,
blinking in the light, crouching, eyes darting for the exits,
but by now all the doors are closed. Nobody else in Japan
dares to, or can even think about doing this.

407. Salami, Salamis, Salaam

2010-12-01T09:25:00.002+09:00

Pannerola pergolum,
dammenola ergo sum;
penda quenda senda mi,
pende quende send to me

amore, more amore.

Oremus, Tio Rabbita,
non che la habita:
negroni vobiscum.
Bebemus, bebe.

Carolina del sul
io non sempre ein fool
wie du so da denkst
devochka.

Non, non, pas encore,
nein, nicht any more,
malum nahii, níl is agam:
ye to bahot acchaa.

DNA veni, out to play.

Ma... ma... manaqua alam nunc,
tra la la ... faquin é slam dunc!

406. Air Lady

2010-11-22T01:30:00.001+09:00

You go you lovely lonely lady
walking in your socks
two dry martinis at cock crow
and then the whole world rocks

you shaved your gorgeous locks
you use no makeup on your face
of all your feminine tricks
today there is no trace

white on white is the room you pace
panther-like, absurdly happy
the world calls on your intercom
say what you want but make it snappy!

The female dasein is soft and sappy:
you could see that, young, obscure.
I'll make this damn world pay for me
of that you can be sure.

II.

Men! Their sickly syrup of desire
was never made for wedded bliss:
geisha. heitari, grand courtesans
from early days taught you this.

Now there is the yawning abyss
to conjure with, Monsieur or Madame Death,
here in a white room, with a white poodle,
disconnected, alone, a single breath

away from life's perfection.
A living male erection
from time to time is required:
one call can do it all.

One puts on a wig, applies lipstick, eye-shadow,
revels in a garter-belt, sheer sexy stockings
and in half an hour it's all over.
No money ever changes hands,
no names, never never the same young man,
so very discreet, so professional,
so very satisfactory! The porter,
some man called Jim or John or Alfonso
(as if I care) handles everything
beautifully, the groceries are always on time,
and his large Christmas tip is assured.

Been living here for the last ten years
safely cocooned on the 45th floor.
A Luftmenschin, I shall never come down.
Why should I any more?
---------------------------------------------------

Luftmensch (pre-Nazi Yiddish: an air-person, someone who has no visible means of support). In this case it has a very different New York sort of meaning. There are people who literally don't come down to street level from their high-level apartments for weeks and months at a time.

405. Ulaidh (Ulster) 1601

2010-11-16T21:29:00.002+09:00

We were called to the gathering
at the hill of Tullahogue, shop-keepers
and middle-aged people of the town, idlers,
old women, children, for all the young men
had gone south with O’Neill.

There was to be a great battle.

Tullahogue with its ancient stone
is a great green valley in a dip of the woods;
we settled in, murmuring, hushing the children,
among the whispering waving trees,
we, the People of Tír Eoghain.

There were three Engish prisoners
and they were brought before us.
A rustling of sounds arose among us
for we did not like them. But then
the Sherriff of the Town, didn’t he

stand up on his legs, waving a cleaver,
and call for the butcher, McCaughlan,
who came up to the stand, by God,
stripped to the waist and the sweat
rolling off his heaving muscularity.

I knew what was going to happen
and I covered the eyes of Síle, my daughter,
and I asked my wife to turn her head away
and she said No. She said no, I want
to see the fuckin bastards killed.

The mother of my children, an O’Cahan
whose brother fell in the battles last year
when I was in my dreary little shop
scraping together the pennies to keep us alive.
God, how she despises me!

The Englishman is young, he shivers,
but not from the cold, he wants to be brave.
The butcher plays to the crowd, he pretends
to swipe, then strikes, a great gout of blood,
and the young men roar and cheer.

Why are they not with O’Neill in the South?

I catch a glimpse from my neighbour
and I can see he is thinking the same.
He has his son clasped tightly within his cloak
and as our eyes glance off one another, he sees
my woman forcing my children to watch.

Nothing good can come of this.

The second and third prisoner are likewise dispatched
but the cheers grow thin. We know. We know
that the English will come and do the same to us,
to my sweet little daughter, to my infant son. My wife
shines with a look of fiery grandeur. She has no idea.

http://irishantiquities.bravehost.com/tyro...tullahogue.html

404. panta rhei

2010-11-10T15:21:00.150+09:00

Ettore Schwartz, Triestine, inveterate smoker,
smiles contentedly, snuggles into the couch
and analyses himself, at odds with the expensive
acolyte of Adler who sits, seriously, out of sight,
just there behind his head. This is rather nice,
thinks Italo Svevo, for this is the name he employs
when he writes his excellent unappreciated novels.
I really must have a word with my English teacher
muses Ettore Svevo, and so thinks Italo Schwartz,
as both, acting as one, reach for the next cigarette.

I cannot imagine what was going through Benjamin’s mind
there on the dusty platform, surrounded by yellow hills,
in one of those dreary arse-end towns (I’ve been through it)
every country seems to have. This is worse than most,
also, not helpfully, in Spain. Might as well be Chihuahua,
with the same hayseed police, smelling of wine and garlic,
mostly of themselves. Like mongrel dogs they smell your fear.
But suicide? Sorry, my dear, you gave up too easily.

Franz Josef was a thick-headed limited old brute
but not the worst of the emperors by any means.
Nobody thinks or even cares of this crusty old character
who went through so much personal heartache, who can
actually know what went through his dreams at night?
His wife, one of the most beautiful women in Europe,
was flighty, horse-mad, and refused to sleep with him,
his only son and heir shot himself with a 17-year-old girl,
and the Hungarians and Czechs never left off badgering.
Then Franz Ferdinand, whom he never liked, got himself shot
and the whole ramshackle Empire blundered into War.
At least, poor dodderer, you never lived to see the end.

Simple advice; when a young girl offers you adoring blowjobs
and you are a middle-aged man, married, and also happen to be
the President of the United States, you should reach deep
into yourself, balancing the pleasure against the consequences,
and say, Why not? You never know when you’ll get the chance again.

I met Bob in Hawai’i when I was driving a taxi for Charley’s.
He was new, I’d been around, I was set up as his Driver Supervisor…

Stauffenberg should have made sure, staying behind
until the final moment of detonation, sacrificing himself
and not racing back to Berlin. I do not question his courage,
which had already been proven, only his judgment, his thinking.
Room was needed, the briefcase moved, and Hitler lived.
I wonder what really would have happened: perhaps not much.
The real heroes, or victims, were Hans and Sophie Scholl.

The first thing, Bob, is you’ve got to stop drinking and driving.
OK, boss. Next thing is don’t lock the doors, let them get out before
they pay. What if they don’t pay? Bob, if I was your customer,
I would definitely pay. Everyone in the company looked askance
at Mad Bob, everyone but me, maybe because he called me boss,
and did some of the things I told him. Some of the things.
Bob had had a bit of a … chequered record in Vietnam.

O turn aside and no more weep
Upon love’s bitter mystery …
Fergus rules the burning cars.

You never loved me. At night, darling, in the darkness,
You would allow me to hover enter it in, you would
grunt and shift your hips, sustaining an angry passing joy,
and then you’d race, sticky from me, to the bathroom.
I lay behind you, dazed, exhausted, thinking this girl
wants to marry me, and if she does, her burst of spread-your-legs
will come to an abrupt skidding end. I could foresee
years of tightened lips and frowns, blanket disapproval,
and while thinking on these things, a monkey came through
the window, scared the bloody hell out of you. He was a young
hungry chappie and I laughed. You carried on so loud I knew
for sure I would never marry you. Tight body and tits to die for,
but downturning lips and that glint in your eye. No thanks.
I need a relaxed little girl, a good cook, ready with a smile.

Bob started to tell me his weird jungle stories
so I sent him out into to the bright lights of the city
which was a mistake: the garish night-scenes of Honolulu,
where the Mahu boys down on Hotel Street, bored and horny,
would fling themselves, baritone, at your crotch,
and you’d hear the polite pop-pop of handguns, soft sounds off,
as people settled their economic and personal differences.
At four in the morning you’d steer around the bodies,
most still alive, lying still, with pale goose-pimpled thighs
under a lightening sky of pale pink and streaks of purple,
and you’d take the dregs of the battered drunk young sailors
to their grey steel ships, bobbing bobbing in Pearl Harbor.

When she was young, you know, she was a tremendous beauty,
the toast of Edwardian London, Hove and the Isle of Wight.
It’s said that the Old King came out and saw her one morning
and brightened up considerably, asked her in for a spot of tea,
and said, My Word, what a sight for sore eyes, etcetera,
that kind of thing, and died, coughing, not very long after.
She preened and pushed out her chest, not inconsiderable
even then, fluttered her lashes over deep violet eyes, behaved
like the stupid bitch she has been ever since. In Wimbledon
in the late fifties, her garden adjoined the dank collapsing
collection of bricks my immigrant poor young parents were renting
from the dying Mr Bannerjee, and she would appear fully dressed
with a damn parrot on her thin left shoulder and say (to me),
Kindly desist from making those distressing noises, as I refought
the Battle of Britain with plastic Spitfires and Messerschmitts,
and the sky was white or grey, with a menacing hint of rain.

Theo had been to Poland, France and Russia with the victorious
Wehrmacht and reckoned it had been pretty good, except. of course,
for the last bit, freezing his balls off in Khaboroshtny, Khonovreshnyev,
something anyway with a fuckin Kh. Bernd (they all called me Bernd)
then I know we lose the war. Fuck Hitler, says Theo. One good thing,
in the Army you never must listen to the verdammte Propaganda.
But in the Rheinland, 1923, I was young boy maybe seven or eight
und die Gebrueder Meerschlag haben mich wie ein junges Maedchen
gedresst mit tennis balls als tits, eine Bluse und skirt, ja, langes Haare
mit ein Wig, dann in the Park hineingeschleppt, und die verdammte
French Negertruppe an mir gekommen sind, Hallo, hallo! Kommen
die Bruder from out die Buschen mit knives from butcher und machen
die Neger zick-zack kaput! Blut! Everywhere blut, blut! They say go, go!
I run. I laugh, ha ha. War not so good. In the beginning, champagne.
In the end, no wine, no beer. Only piss, ja, piss and dirty water.

Theo grins sardonically. Theo is my pal.
Bob is also sort of a pal but he worries me.
Mr Bloom is a thoughtful Jew, miles and miles from Trieste,
nestled, unsettled, under the gaze of doddery old Franz Josef:
K.u.K, Kaiserlich und Koeniglich, Coocoo, Kakka.
The world turns. On its axis. Not much choice.

At dinner parties, journalists back from war zones are occasionally asked what it was really like. Perhaps the most accurate answer would be to rape the hostess, murder the host, cut the children’s throats and set fire to the house, without any further explanation.

On his deathbed, Ettore calls for another cigarette.
This, he thinks, will really be the last one. The Last Time,
I don’t know. Benjamin thinks of the best way to die.
Stauffenberg, his mind ticking, looks down from a cracked
airplane window, sees the damp fields of Germany mutely yearning,
helplessly spread below. Soon I’ll be in Berlin. Soon we’ll all be
in Berlin, more a metaphor than a city. I was going to speak about
Bob and Honolulu. Bob arrived from Saigon as it was known then
after three years in Leavenworth, one of those maximum security
prisons where God-fearing white Americans send unruly minorities
to moulder, to grow old and crazy, die. Seems Bob had shot and killed
his Platoon Sergeant, some redneck hillbilly with a drinking problem,
stitched him across the chest, brrrppp, brrrrpp, brppp, oops, dead,
and said, I’m gettin the fuck outta here. They called it in on the radio
before the Cong wiped them out, every single last little lonely one,
and that was the end of Bob’s platoon. Bob, who was large and loony,
hijacked some poor (God-fearing) little chaplain in a jeep, rattled
his brains, and turned up with his papers at Tan Son Nhut, the airport.
First they sent him to Leavenworth and then they sent him to me.

I fell in love with Molokai. I used to go there once or twice a year
just to get away from the nyah-nyah shite of Honolulu.
There were no hotels, no cranky tourists, no grinning Japanese,
only ill-dressed locals in battered pickup trucks, a third of whom
were gay, gently fondling your balls (chug-chug went the motor),
softly sighing as the message of polite rejection sank slowly in.
They would bring pakololo to your campsite, bottles, slyly chide you.

In life you meet all sorts. Life, people, ding-ding, all that shite.
Bob was doing great until he murdered one of his passengers.
It was the night shift, I reckon the fucker deserved it, you’d almost
not want to drive on nights of the full moon, whatever people say,
the loonies would come out in squadrons. Some sweet little girlie
cracked my mate Jimmy’s head with a hammer, fractured his skull,
he’s never been the same since, tho’ not scintillating to start with.
War zone. That’s how, dear friends, I paid for my Masters degree.
The PLO, come to think of it, were doe-eyed lovely young men,
not a bit like the tattooed hard chaws in the well-trained Provies,
offhand little ‘do’s’ with both sets reduced me to trembling jelly.
I was never really a soldier, more like a civilian in uniform,
and I don’t like getting shot at. Sorry. Could be a personal thing.
One of those bullets smacks home and no more poems. I know.
I can see that hopeful glimmer in your eye. Patience, please.
There’s always traffic accidents.

Ettore got banged up in a traffic accident, around 1927 or 37,
not great with the dates: his old pal JJ had helped to make him famous
in France, followed by the furiously blushing snobberie of literary Italy,
and he died in bed, which is generally a good thing, longing for the last,
that very last and final cigarette. Ah, such bliss (puff) to be alive ….

403. America Votes -- Don'cha Love It?

2010-11-03T00:14:00.006+09:00

Midterm elections today with the Republicans reckoned to win control of the House -- they need something like 39 new seats and are thought to be heading for 50 or more. Only 37 seats up for grabs in the Senate where it's less likely the Republicans will reach a majority -- less likely but not impossible.

Midterms are generally a reaction against the President elected two years previously. Americans are impatient people and when the Mr Fixit elected in a glorious wreath of promises and declarations finds reality a tougher nut to crack, the American public duly turns against him. There never has been a her, not yet, and probably not for some time to come. Strange that other countries around the world, backward by definition, have already managed female presidents and prime ministers, but we obviously don't want to go there right now: don't want to be accused of 'America-bashing' which covers just about every damn thing any foreigner says about America that falls short of drooling praise. Not now.

Two of the things highlighted in this election round have been the enormous costs, apparently the highest ever (interesting, when one considers that the abyssmal state of the economy has been one of the main issues) and the prevalence of attack ads in which candidates, straining at the leash, fall slightly short of calling their enemies (sorry, opponents) sad camel-humping degenerate blobs of slime beneath their shoes, with some off-the-wall comments on witchcraft and ... was that some brand of after-shave? Terrible, terrible, but nothing new as Clancy Sigal reports below:

To refresh our memories: In 1800 John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, once warm friends, tore each other apart because President Adams found himself running against candidate Jefferson. Adams’s hacks called Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived…son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”   (Race mattered even then.) Jefferson’s PR man, a proto-Karl Rove, slammed Adams as a “repulsive pedant” and “hideous hermaphroditical character.” That’s before the mud slinging got really ugly, Tom labeling John as a hypocrite, criminal and tyrant anxious to drag us into war with France and John calling Tom a sex-mad atheist and coward.

Mud stuck, and Tom stole – er, won – the election.   A few years later John Quincy Adams was called a pimp, and Andrew Jackson’s wife a slut and his mother a Negro-loving prostitute. Davy Crockett accused Martin van Buren of wearing women’s corsets. Of course Abe Lincoln was for slave-loving Democrats the “gorilla tyrant” – and he had stinky feet too. In the 1884 elections Republicans accused nominee Grover Cleveland of fathering and abandoning an illegitimate child with the party slogan “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”. (And when Cleveland won the presidency the Democrats paid back with, “In the White House, ha ha ha!”)

Closer to modern times, Teddy Roosevelt running against obese William Howard Taft called him “a rat in a corner”, and William McKinley’s supporters tagged candidate William Jennings Bryan a crazy degenerate. In my time, President Roosevelt was compared unfavorably to Hitler, had committed “the crime of the century” by giving Federal money to the jobless, was a demented paralytic cripple and probably Jewish (“Rosenfelt” was a common slur) and had a lesbian wife.   It follows that Jack Kennedy had to be the Pope’s captive, Barry Goldwater a dangerously psychotic warmonger, thrice-wounded Lt.John Kerry ‘swiftboated’ as a cowardly liar, and in the 2000 presidential primaries John McCain effectively lost the nomination when South Carolinians were leafleted that he had fathered an illegitimate black baby.

I confess to loving that "In the White House, ha ha ha!".

Are US midterm elections important in any way? Sure. They generally change the balance of power in the ornery, self-seeking, and very hard-to-handle legislative branch of government, usually to the detriment of the reigning President. Does this have international repercussions? Duh ... do bears hunt around for Portakabins? Does the Pope hang with Hare Krishna? When America sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold; part of it come down with double-pneumonia when this or that program gets delayed, diluted or simply slashed or mashed. Do these voters and all these candidates in their hundreds of constituencies and havens of local concern know or even care? Course not. It's just too much to hold in people's brains which have about a 500 cc capacity to start with. Hell, what's that in ounces?

The really dangerous thing is that policy-making loses continuity, stutters, bends to the winds of political change. The Chinese don't have to worry about that. Democracy is not just an excuse for everyone to argue and fight and shout others down. It's a system of government based on the idea that power derives from the people and not from a traditional sheltered elite, although there is this tendency among the rich and well-connected in all nations. A democratic nation depends on the wisdom and common sense of its collective citizenry. A totalitarian nation doesn't have to: it just tells people what to do, or else. When the two systems come in conflict there is an initial advantage to the powers run by central rule. This goes back to the Greeks and Persians. Hitler revived the Asiatic ideal in the very heart of Europe, as did Stalin in Russia. The real history of the Second World War is how these two conflicting political empires tore each other apart like snarling wolves. The British "won" by holding out in their island fortress in 1940-41 and waiting for America to come to its aid. America, dilatory as usual, hung around for a few years and came in to bomb Germany and apply the coup de grace in the Normandy invasion, when the war had already been lost by the Germans in the East. This is not the history you learn in school but this is what actually happened. The German Wehrmacht was broken on the Eastern Front where they took 8 out of 10 of their total casualties. The Russians lost millions, not only soldiers but civilians.

The subsequent Cold War between the US and USSR changed the whole way of thinking about how Nazi Germany had really been defeated. Just look at the movies, the comics, the TV shows, every damn thing. Of all the nations involved the United States suffered the least. I'm talking in terms of comparison with other nations. The US had military casualties, many, but far fewer than other combatant nations and hardly any civilian casualties to speak of. Their homeland was never under threat. They were never bombed or invaded. There were no refugees on the roads. The country went on pretty much as normal, as it had during all its wars since the last real war on its own territory which was the Civil War of 1861-65. Every war since then has been in other countries which provides us with the "F" in the VFW cap badge. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. No way! From any point of view it was a damn good thing. Who needs burning cities, dead children, concentration camps?

The distance from the real horror of war -- the stinks and the smells, the collapsed rubble of towns, the bloated bodies of humans and animals scattered all over -- has inoculated this country in a way to the decline of respect for the military in Europe. Europe, having seen two devastating wars in the 20th century, wants no further part of militarism. All the pomp of the Kaiser and his goose-stepping armies, not to mention Hitler with his tens of thousands of troops in steel helmets at mass Party rallies, is a thing nobody ever wants to see again. We all know what happened. No, thank you! Military officers do not wear uniform in public in European countries and the enlisted men would never even consider it. Conscription does still exist in some countries (the most effective of all is in Switzerland, probably the most historically belligerent country in Europe, but that is a strange Minute-Man story all of its own) and the general status of professional military people is low. Been there, done it, never again, is the public attitude.

The public attitude in America remains totally different. The military hold a position of respect. It's OK to wear your uniform in public. No politician would ever dare criticize the military (have you ever heard one doing so?) The military are as American as Mom and apple pie. Why? Because, I would suggest, the civilian population of the US has never had to live through any of its wars since 1865. They haven't actually seen or experienced what war is actually like. It's all movies and TV and computer games. Sure, the military went through a bad patch during and after Vietnam -- but that was far away and overseas. Some poor returning GIs, survivors, got spat upon by ignorant anti-war activists, and I call them ignorant for the good and simple reason that they were spitting on the wrong people. But memories are short. The hippie chicks of the 60s are, many of them, roly-poly grandmothers -- with a little stash of weed on the side. Vietnam might as well be a million years ago.

If there was an active national memory (take Germany, for example, or even Japan) there would be no rush on the part of any young men to engage in a new war. If you don't know what war really is, how destructive it can be, and if it doesn't affect your own home and community, it can become a false test of manhood. God Bless You, Son ... Defend the Flag! The Hemingway, the John Wayne mystique: once people read books, later they learned about life from movies. Ironically, a great deal of this nationalist fog derives from Germans such as Fichte and Schelling, Schopenhauer and poor bloody Nietzsche. The whole neo-Prussian ideal under Bismarck (partially effective) and the wild-eyed revival under the (eventually self-destructive) Nazis came from these airy-fairy philosophical sources extolling the supremacy of the nation-state . Mystical, unquestioned nationalism. But that's OK. Only foreigners are nationalists. Americans are patriots.

This is where I remind you about China. It's huge. Every fifth person on the planet is Chinese. I was in Peking (Beijing) last July-August and the young people there were open and friendly but blame their unhappiness (not enough goddam money) not on their own government but on the Japanese. Huh? They are incredibly nationalistic, or should that be patriotic? Since I was there these young people have been out on huge anti-Japanese demonstrations (late September) and all the violence and noise comes across as an "allowed" diversion policy orchestrated by the government. You'd have to be really dumb to forget Tian-An-Men Square in '89.

If the people are unhappy, wrote Machiavelli back in the 1200s, the Prince must direct their rage on outsiders. Over the centuries, this paleo-con policy still seems to work. The Chinese seem to use it effectively, and so do some American politicians when their target is immigrants, possibly the hardest-working people in the country. Always target the outsider. If you trawl through the oral histories of any immigrant group into the US from the Famine Irish of the 1840s to the Boat People Vietnamese of the 1970s you'll find the same sad story of intense local hostility. The Negroes, now elevated to the title of Afro-Americans, have been living this story for, what, nearly 400 years?

But this election doesn't really seem to be about foreign policy does it? The economy, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, the Mexican Border (if that works, what's to stop the Canadians building a fence to keep the Yanks out?), environmental protection, health care, one hears about all these things but very little about the two wars that are smouldering (Iraq) and intensifying (Afghanistan), in the latter country to the point of possible defeat. Even Lord Petraeus admits the US can't defeat the Taliban according to Woodward's recent book on Obama's War. The best plan is, apparently, to separate them from Al Quaida and go after AQ in Pakistan instead. Sure, guys, run into nuclear military-run Pakistan, presently funding the Taliban through unacknowledged elements of ISI, their military intelligence branch, while the government is also engaged in a proxy war with nuclear India using militants in Kashmir and (very secretly) arranging the terrorist attack on Mumbai.

Simple. Americans are can-do people. We make plans.
Right. Well, that's OK, then.

The British were facing more or less the same problems with the unruly Afghans back in 1897 when a young junior officer, some uppity pudgy little chap , wrote a book about it called 'The Malakand Field Force'. His name was ... em ... Winston ... Winston Spencer Something.

402. Major the Honourable P. Arker

2010-10-20T09:46:00.000+09:00

Four miles over the thing
the road begins, complaisant, lovely
just what you'd expect. When I look I see nothing
and everything, kaleidolly, scopically, slotting
bangles and hairworn twisted tangles
into dust. I must be brave. I can only save
some, not many; perhaps, I think,
not any, as the rivers race down to the sea.
I could have been happy, you know, as these things go,
in Middleton Park, 28, just down the row,
happily coming home for tea
with my mad mother, my distanced father,
books in the library and a bit of cricket
on bumpy greens with a snarling yeomanry.
When I hit my ball through your window, darling,
did you hold it in a lewd lascivious way, thinking
Omigod I can carry on from this. When I had to piss
in the trenches (the War), booting aside the bodies,
I never thought of that, I thought of kidney pies
and roast pork and crackling. My mouth positively
watering with the thought of everything but you.
It's true you stood beside me on the hustings,
leatherlunged, God Bless You, in the khaki election
and I was so happy. Alive, like, after the war.
I'm so awfully sorry I had to murder you, doll,
but you were becoming such a pain and you wouldn't listen
so with a wink and a nod the lads did you in
and I attached myself to Churchill, the coming man,
and with my red-rimmed eyes and hoarse croaky voice
he believed every thing I told him. This radar, I said,
is a waste of time, and don't send boats to Dunkirk.
Bombing Germany is total nonsense, Winnie you berk,
and tell the bloody Yanks to back off, stay home.
I managed to extend the war by two or three years.
Later, when I was running my high-class nightclub
between several bombed-out buildings down in Soho
the girls would come screaming for champagne, naturally,
and so we'd give them shaken Algerian fizz. In this way
we set the taste for the next three generations.
Later still, when I was elevated to the House of Lords,
I voted against everything, we always did on principle,
and had a charming pied a terre in nearby Pimlico,
where, rising from bed among languorous naked bodies
I'd complain, Can't you bitches cook an English Breakfast?
Laughter. I'd knot my tie, slope down to the Allingham Café
for bangers and mash, bacon, toast and railway tea.
And this is how I ruled Britain for the next twenty years.
Bring back hanging! I became peculiar and more dangerous
and was incarcerated off in the wilds of Walthamstow
not far from the High Street pub called the "Victoria"
where I'd appear on gala nights in tutu and lace stockings
because I knew the manager and they couldn't fence me in.

401. Auden Reads Robertson Davies

2010-10-13T21:14:00.004+09:00

In darkness, deep complexity,
dots of light and understanding
shine amid perplexity.

Words are not mere signifiers
for untold millions of civilians.

No, they act as signal fires,
calling, reassuring, reaching down

into shared uncertainty,
(born too late or born too soon)
deep in the human cocoon.

400. Moscow Ballet: 1917 (rewritten as a Rainis Sonnet)

2010-10-13T20:58:00.004+09:00

This poem was rewritten in collaboration with Tony of Poetry Magnum Opus who introduced me to the form and came up with two alternate versions; he also contributed the final killer couplet!

Lithe and willowy, the sad-eyed soubrette
retreats from stares. Her alabaster lips
seal in cares she cannot speak of yet,
her gliding young body sways and dips.

Hidden are the yellow rotting fangs
brought on by war. In art she can forget
for passing moments her hunger pangs.

Grace under pressure by a crushed coquette,
foreshadow years of Soviet roulette.

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

Rainis Sonnet is a short meditation. Whether or not it is a true sonnet is up for debate. It is a lyrical meditation with a turn or volta, however it is shorter than the usual quatorzain of the sonnet. It is named for the Latvian philosopher and poet Janis Rainis (1868-1929)

Rainis Sonnet is:

1. written in 9 lines made up of a quatrain, followed by a tercet ending with a couplet.
2. metered, primarily iambic pentameter.
3. rhymed, turned on only 3 rhymes. Rhyme scheme abab (cbc or cac) and (aa or bb or cc).
4. written with the epiphany arriving in the tercet.

(with thanks to our very own Tink of PMO!)

Original version:

Young and willowy, the sad young soubrette
retreats from glances; she cannot say, not yet,
anything from behind her closed alabaster lips
as her body sways and moves, glides and dips.

Those lips press over stunted decaying yellow fangs
that all young Russians possess, from hunger pangs
brought on by poverty, despair, and this dreadful war
and they do not, cannot, understand what life is for.

Yet in moments of beauty and stylish grace
attention turns from a suffering face.

399. in a field of sorrow fling your medals at flying birds

2010-10-13T20:49:00.000+09:00

Three-sevenths of my precious world
is under water, no longer responding to signals,
desparate signals, sent out by a mind, a brain,
itself water-logged, now somewhat clogged
by thoughts. O God, thoughts! Them things.

I recall an old newsreel, possibly from the BBC,
some hesitant bloke at the top of the Eiffel Tower,
strapped into homemade wings, his own invention,
hoping against hope he can fly. He stands thinking
much like me: I will, I won't. I must, I can't.

In late August at the Berghof, 1939,
an angry roiling sky of purple, green, azure, pink
confronts Herr Hitler and his retinue
on the very day the Soviet pact is signed
and they stand and look, appalled: this means
death and rivers of blood cries a Hungarian lady:
Was muss sein muss sein, barks a rattled Fuehrer,
thinking men, not the gods, control destiny.

Our man on the Eiffel Tower pauses ... now he jumps!
He drops like a stone, a few moments for final thoughts,
maybe like Hitler. Sense of the end before the sickening SPLAT.
Expectation can make cowards of us all.
We do many things we do not want to, do not have to do
out of pride, out of the shame of turning back,
often out of the fear of being seen to turn back.
It is a feature of the weak to carry through with their convictions.

In the face of much misery and boredom there may be love
for the lucky few: there are times, my dear, when it seems
that the world passes by in a great parade, a rigoumalade
of kings and emperors, ticker-tapes for heroes, marching soldiers
and blasting bands and bunting, wild and waving cheering crowds.
It is never a bad thing to have a holiday: elections and wars
in their starting and in their ending seem to fill the streets
with non-involved citizens in an excess of emotion, an expression
of their national, safely removed, detached and private feeling.

Coming back from the war, this left me reeling.
I was unimpressed. I think this is true for all temporary soldiers.

I thought I might find some private paradise
between your thighs, heaving and groaning with gasping sighs,
but found instead your face and eyes, and something else.
When we visit Paris, long after this, our splendid honeymoon,
I shall not jump off the Eiffel Tower, with or without wings.
I shall do nothing to displease you, love, unless my love
you hold my hand. So easy then to jump together.

398. Anno Dom

2010-10-13T20:44:00.000+09:00

O God, O God, O God,
get your blessed head out of the clouds
and look down here below, or else
give a final dumb paternal nod
to idiots speaking in Your Name!

Hindus and Muslims share the blame
of birth, brought up outside the empire
of our great cathedrals: here the stamp of grandeur
establishes holiness, in a place where shame
is thrown upon women, upon the weak,

and with contempt: the dark thick mud of centuries,
the long long generations of living in darkness.
But suddenly, O, such soaring music!

We are told to turn the other cheek
but never do. We engage in warfare,
unceasingly, with better and better weapons,
pretend all the while we are mild and meek,
kill people in their thousands.

397. The Eblana Reel

2010-09-27T10:47:00.000+09:00

Three burning castles shall no longer illumine
my Dublin dreams, nor will splintering glass
awake me, nor heavy knocks at the shuddering door.

THUNK

Sweety-pie, my Dove, my Love,
Pleeze, pu-leeze be true … ting!
Angelina, Angelina ...

THUNK-THUNK

carried her chest to Argentina …
both of them, by God, bazooms,
and a spare one in the baggage

THUNK-THUNK-THUNK

What?? But … but that’s outrageous!
You can’t possibly expect people to believe …
Omigod, you have the photographs?

All right, all right, I’ll do it.

Herr Hitler this is Senor Franco
No doubt you will wish to discuss the War
over a refreshing cup of Irish Coffee?

I’m in love with love and loveliness
myself. I cannot, Lord, quite help it:

Three sugars?

Tha buaidh air an uisge-bheath'
Tha buaidh air cha chòr e cleith
Tha buaidh air an uisge-bheath'
Gun òlainn teth is fuar i.

But you must tell me more, dear Adolf,
Well, yes, all right … Adi Baby,
Was Geli the Right Girl for you?

She was quite young, I believe?
Ahhhhh …. Hmmmm. Ah. Hmmmm.
Rotten luck she shot herself,

and now you do be with another young wan
in your big house there in the mountains?
Jolly piece, is she? Ah, that’s a step up, Adi.

She wants wha’? Kiss and make up with the Jews?
Fair play, but you can't allow that class of carry-on!
Step down hard, Adi, ship off another two million

and she's sure to come round, she'll be all over you,
sure, you'll be having to dig yourself outta her!
I crossed the frontier that evening just in time

not that the French had much going for them.
Dunno why nobody seems to like the French,
I’ve never had a problem with the bastards

apart from money, and that’s always the women,
great big fat craythurs with moustaches and abaci,
them clickety things, got up in their black bombazine,

eyes on them like gimlets, doing me bleedin head in
down in Mers-el-Kebir or wherever that place I was,
with the ocean, the Mediterranean, it must have been,

crashing on the shore, and the oul head none too steady
after those seven bottles of local plonk the night before
which I knew it was bad after the fifth, but carried on.

Soldiers, soldiers, such as we
Serve in the King’s Infanterie!
Bravely, bravely we’ll advance
Our Monarch’s fame we shall enhance!
Mister Cope do you have a hope
To shoot the head from off the Pope?

I’ve always had a fancy for that jolly little song
even as a Catholic, as if the Pope really needs me,
some oul' swarthy Italian git, I geeve you my blessssing,
my shhonn, I steek my finger up your …

That tune now, it’s so essentially English,
dunno how to express it rightly, it’s sprightly,
bouncy, so very jolly and profoundly stupid,
so English, expressing the genius of the race

who are without doubt gawky simpletons at play,
hee-hawing, dressing up with delight in silly costumes,
but hard as steel in business, harder still in war.

I do not think I love them.
I can't think of anyone who loves them.
And yet they seem to love themselves.

Hello, I am English. Do you love me?

Angelina, Angelina,
believes in things I no longer care about,
stalks me from a previous century.

God, I know, I can be stiff and boring!
Boring you, dear, when stiff, and poking fun
at the thrust of your missionary disposition:

you clutch a Bible in your left little hand
and a baby-pink (oiled & ribbed) in the other
and I fear you, my dear, your raw demand!

For now the wimp is limp,
half-hearted, garrulous,
what you might call Welsh.

Welshing.
O Darling!

You are the finest woman I have ever seen
(from a distance, anyway).
May we meet, my love, in Stephen’s Green.

396. Vita summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

2010-09-15T20:58:00.003+09:00

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
-- James Elroy Flecker

Too much bone and blood
and fortitude, too much straining
for the evanescent: passing years
drip by, form streams, gurgling,
receding, all too rapidly draining
to where we are today. I must say
there were some bloody great parties,
helpless laughter, incandescent trysts
with ladies now of a certain age,
fresh and gorgeous in my memory.

Girls are lovely, they really are,
most of all when they are young,
coming up like fresh little flowers
in each generation: the young boys
never figure this out, thinking the present
will last forever. Sad. Sad, also silly.

Detached from our purblind monomania,
age executes its subtle daily attacks
on hairlines, jowls and bellies; we rarely
seem to pay much heed or attention,
until, after a sudden glance in a mirror,
or faced with a photo of a recent funeral,
(not so long ago we attended weddings)
we think, Jesus God, can that be me?
No, it is not me. It is a cruel parody
of the brave young man shining within.
-------------------------------------------------
Original:

Too much bone and blood
and fortitude, too much straining
for the evanescent: how the years
drip-drip, creating streams, gurgling
down the diverse and the dreary drains
to where we are today. I must say
we had some bloody great parties!
Helpless laughter, incandescent clicks
with ladies now of a certain age,
fresh and gorgeous in my memory.
Girls are lovely, they really are,
most of all when they are young,
coming up like fresh little flowers
in each generation: the young boys
can’t figure this out, thinking the present
will last forever. Sad, but it never does.
For us non-gay boys it doesn’t matter;
automatically married, dazed, a bit
sidetracked, a bit blind to our senses,
a bit unaware in our purblind monomania
to how age executes its savage attacks
on hairlines, jowls, and bellies, we never
notice or pay attention to these things,
until with a sudden glance in a mirror,
or faced with a photo at so-and-so’s funeral
(until not so long ago it was weddings)
we think, Jesus God, can that be me?
No, it is not me. It is a parody.
I am the brave young man that shines within.

395. West Clare, August

2010-09-13T01:17:00.005+09:00

The wind, rippling across unruly fields,
is chill, not warm, on this summer night,
and it runs in a rush down the narrow road
between tangled bushes of unripe berries.
A tall shape appears, dark from the darkness,
a bicycle of the sturdy kind, its dim light dancing,
of a type much admired by bachelor farmers.
A song, a sweet tenor, separates from the air,
and the clear heart-breaking song of youth
arises: it is the thrush-like throat of Dinny Joe,
who was all of eighty-four when the sister died,
his housekeeper, last year or the year before?
I retreat without words into silent shadows
for I would not for the world interrupt him
as he cycles into darkness, legend and death.
----------------------------------------------------
Original:

The wind that rustles the fields of grain
is chill, not warm, on summer nights,
as it runs in a rush down the narrow road
among tangled bushes of unripe berries.
A tall shape appears, dark from the darkness,
a bicycle of the sturdy kind, its dim light dancing,
of a type much admired by bachelor farmers.
A song, a sweet tenor, separates from the air,
and the clear heart-breaking song of youth
comes from the thrush-like throat of Dinny Joe,
who was all of eighty-four when his sister died,
his housekeeper, last year, or was it the year before?
I retreat without thinking into silent shadows
for I would not for the world interrupt him
as he cycles into darkness, legend and death.

394. The Easter Rising

2010-09-12T11:34:00.006+09:00

All is changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born
-- W.B. Yeats

Idiots, really,
drunk on oratory and illusions:
a poet's rebellion with real bullets.

I love how they went to the tailors,
taking fittings for fine new uniforms,
tunics and belts to be buried in.

It was the style of the thing --
sauntering out, sartorially splendid,
at lunchtime on a public holiday.

Christ is crucified.
Christ is risen.
Christ will live again.

A sidelong smirk, a furtive wave,
Jayzus, Jim, and what’s the craic?
Can’t talk, Joe, I’m on Parade!

The GPO. Left Wheel! Attack!
Look here, young fella, do you mind,
amn’t I next in the queue for stamps!

Kindly leave the premises, madam:
Volunteer Muldoon! On yer bike, missus,
G’wan, get away on out of it.

Run up the flag, the Plough and Stars!
Read out the lengthy Proclamation!
Ehh, ... hell's that fella after sayin’?

Look, here come the bloody Lancers!
Clippety-clopping along the cobblestones:
Volunteers! Five rounds rapid … Fire!

O God, dey do be dead!
Bear up, Muldoon, they are the enemy.
Feck the sojers, dem lubbly horses!

Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi

The English are capitalists, says Connolly,
they would never destroy public property!
Soon shells rain down on the central city.

Machine guns, snipers, rake the roadsteads,
and in little heaps, in shapeless huddled rags,
stray civilians go down in the crossfire.

Explosions, the zing and ring and ping
of bullets caroming off the stonework:
Get away, ya bleedin' hoor, ya missed!

Fires take hold, walls glow, grow white-hot,
the ceiling burns, then sags, starts to collapse:
ammunition low, the lads keep banging away.

We must charge the barricades, cries Connolly,
Jayz, Muldoon, yeh shoulda stopped in the pub!
Ehh, could we not, like, crawl behind them, sorr?

Hippety-hop, out one of the side doors,
the bullets spark on the flags of Henry Street:
a skip and a jump and it’s into Henry Lane.

Fires all around, bullets at every crossroad,
sandbag redoubts at the end of each street:
The O’Rahilly leaps up and leads a charge

but they’re all knocked over, bowled like skittles,
bleeding, groaning, beside upturned market barrows
among the cabbage leaves and cauliflowers.

It’s then that a bemused Commandant Pearse,
after seven days of ceaseless noise and slaughter,
decides the time has come to pack things in.

But how to get the English to stop firing?
White flags have been no help to the poor civilians,
nor even the sad appeasement of Union Jacks.

The Army over time has gone wild and feral,
enraged by the sting of huge, unexpected losses,
it means to impose revenge on this rebel City.

Let me try, says the nurse, Elizabeth O’Farrell,
and with a great big wave of her Red Cross flag,
she boldly steps out in the street …

And the English hold their fire.
Silence: Christ is on the Cross.

What follows is a tale of the times:
General Lowe, the British Officer Commanding,
cannot accept surrender from a woman!

Three hours later, the whole thing’s over,
and we can see the blurred but famous photo:
Pearse surrenders to General Lowe.

It’s over, so quixotic, so silly,
such a desperate hopeless military fling
in the face of a furious Empire

(who were none too bloody pleased
at this stab in the back, as they saw it,
in the midst of a War they were losing!)

Comes the question of retribution,
and with it comes the turning point,
when England loses Ireland forever.

With their city thrown into flaming ruins,
the populace is enraged, and not with the English,
but with these home-grown damn'd fanatics!

When the prisoners are led to the docks
the whole city turns out to jeer and pelt them:
Look at yez now, yeh bleedin’ bowsies!

England has only to be calm and cool,
to be reassuring, play on the prevailing mood,
but opts instead for savage executions.

First there is silent and stunned disbelief,
whispered murmurings, a stirring of anger,
and then the photographs begin to appear.

Images of the executed leaders proliferate,
first in private homes, then in gathering places,
then in public places throughout the land.

When the troops go angrily tearing them down,
the well-known stubborn streak comes out,
and the mood of the whole country changes.

The lads fought a fair fight, stood up to them,
and were good clean-living boys, the most of them.
No need to go shooting them down like animals!

Christ is Crucified.
Christ is Risen.
Christ Will Live Again.

1916 was the blood sacrifice,
a purity of belief that stayed in our minds
and gave rise to Irish freedom.

When I think of the men of 1916
I wish I had been one among them,
racing down to the barricades

and fighting for Ireland, not actually dying,
(Muldoon muddled through, very glad to hear it)
just dodging the bullets, having the craic

and then boring the pants off people in the pub,
cadging drinks on the strength of a '16 Medal
for ever and ever and ever and ever. Amen.

Slideshow link: http://picasaweb.google.com/dedalus07/1916...feat=directlink


Pearse surrenders to General Lowe at the top of Moore Street. Elizabeth O'Farrell has been airbrushed out of the photo (one can see her feet and the hem of her skirt beside the feet of Pearse).

393. With the World Cup Over, Is There Nothing Left to Live For?

2010-07-21T10:35:00.003+09:00

Oh well, another disgusting final. I'm glad Spain won (mildly) since it would have been an affront to see the brutal hacking Dutch walk off with the prize. I like the Dutch, who doesn't, but not this team.

What's to do now for the next four years? Slip back into the black hole of anonymity ... if that's even a word. Work. Earn less money than I spend. Spend it anyway. Write. Enjoy cooking. Drink less. Eat more pickles. Avoid young & beautiful women. Search Google Images for pictures they'll ALLOW me to use to illustrate this shoestring Blog. Go to Peking next Wednesday ... that should be good.

392. Spain Brings Germany to Heel 1-0

2010-07-09T04:26:00.000+09:00

The Germans had been doing so well, racking up four goals in three separate matches, and they'd been playing a very attractive kind of football. They were so lightning quick on the counter-attack and could move the ball down the field in seconds. England looked absolutely stodgy and clueless against them and the vaunted Argentines simply fell apart. Then they came up against (arguably) the best team in the world. They certainly didn't buckle under and held on as dangerous contenders throughout most of the game. The Spanish were just the better team. The score doesn't really reflect the psychological game. The eager young German team tried everything and none of it worked. The Spanish foiled all of their moves and took over the game, inexorably imposing their superiority. The Germans simply couldn't rattle them. The header was brutal, to be honest, had nothing to do with the finesse of the passing game till then, but you could almost see the Germans losing heart. Schweinsteiger (pig-climber?) started losing his cool as did Ozil and Klose -- my personal bete-noir for reasons below -- and desperation began to set in. They began to realise they couldn't crack the Spanish defence. It was an absolutely intriguing game to watch.

Fair dues to the Germans, though. They were a young team with many players brought up from their Under-21s -- England take note!! -- and they played excellent attacking football against the big-name stars of the Premier League and South America. Spain simply contained them and then struck for the winning goal. Germany were hardly humiliated but they were taught a lesson in football all the same. You can be sure many of these same German players will show up in World Cup 2014 with more experience and could prove to be even more lethal. They played extemely well and they have nothing to be ashamed of.

I was hoping for a Holland-Germany final, if only for the drama. It would be like Celtic-Rangers on the world stage. Every match these two teams play is a mini-war with sheer hatred being the driving force. In the runup to the England-Germany match the British tabloids were plugging the Battle of Britain and World War Two but the Germans were basically indifferent. They are never indifferent when they play against Holland which they see as their main rivalry.

Too bad about that. Spain-Holland (a European Final, who says we've lost the plot and become a shower of wimps?) is almost as good, but the Dutch are going to have a hard time cracking the Spanish nut. The Dutch are tough, spirited and opportunistic in the best traditions of high-seas piracy but this Spanish team is so good, so confident, so abundantly bursting with talent that they'd be very lucky to win. Even so, this is football. You can never predict what is going to happen. We have a good match to look forward to next Sunday!

In my unbounded enthusiasm for the Spanish team I nearly forgot to add on the reasons I dislike Klose and would like to give him a good root up the arse. It goes back, as many things do, to the World Cup in Japan/Korea in 2002.

It was impossible to get tickets. People who were here then can remember that distinctly. Anyway, a pal from Ireland was coming over with spares and I could go to all three matches in the qualifying round if I wanted. This was June, but with the end of term exams looming I couldn't go mad altogether. Choose one, I told myself. Obviously that would be Germany-Ireland.

We met up in Tokyo and went off in a cattle train to the ground in Ibaraki. You can read the details here.

The Irish fans outnumbered the Germans by about 10-1. It was a Sea of Green and the Japanese wearing German kit were suitably intimidated. We had the bodhrans going ratatatat and we were roaring out The Fields of Athenry. The German team looked rattled when their national anthem sort of drifted away into the sultry air and ours shook the very foundations of the stadium. The match was nervy to start with as many first round matches are. The Germans were the superior team but the Irish were doing what they do best, tackling very hard, chasing every ball, and mounting unexpected counterattacks. The first half was inconclusive until Klose, an incomparable predator it has to be said, got his head to a high ball in the area just below where we were sitting and flicked an unstoppable header past Shay Given. It was a brilliant goal, but it's what happened next that pissed us off. He did his usual run and slide along his knees, fists pumping. So far what you'd expect. Then he stood up and shook his fist at the Irish fans in the stand with a look of pure malice on his narrow face. What?? This was met with a shower of Boos. Righty-o, mate, your card is marked!

End of first-half. Ireland down 1-0 ... I mean, it was a good goal ,,, but the fans are seething over this arrogant bastard. Second half goes back and forth, a few chances here and there, nothing serious, time starts running away. Next thing you know we're into overtime -- 4 minutes. First minute, nothing happens; second and third minutes, ditto, and then in the last thirty seconds of the game Robbie Keane bursts through into the area and slots one past the large and hairy German goalkeeper, Kahn. Goal! For a moment there is stunned silence and then the whole stadium erupts in a roar of delight from the throats of 5 or 6000 Irishmen. Tweet! goes the whistle and that'ts the end of the match. The German team seems to disappear in about twenty seconds and the Irish do the rounds of the pitch soaking up the cheers of the fans for ... oh, I don't know ... 10, 15, 20 minutes?

I'd told my school I'd be away for two days. But the match is on Tuesday (or Wednesday, or whatever, it was a weekday) and you can return that night or the next morning, surely? Ahh, no, I don't think so. My friends want me to show them around Tokyo. Total bullshit. I knew damn well that win, draw, or lose we'd be legless until 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning either celebrating or commiserating and that I'd be in no fit state for any sort of social intercommunication until well into the following afternoon and possibly for some time thereafter. Good thinking for so it proved. The Irish took over half the bars of Tokyo that night with our flags and songs. Ah, Klose, you miserable bastard: it's never as easy as you think!

391. Saved from the Flames

2010-07-07T21:29:00.001+09:00

Excerpts from Granddad's Diaries
(the bits Grandma couldn't find to burn)

In my younger days I'd gape
at famous people: I was a fool,
when I think about it. I’d forgotten
the old and everlasting rule
that nothing, nobody lasts forever.

Too many friends
having topped themselves,
not very well, hardly
artistically, often with rather
messy consequences

I thought, I felt, well ...

My dear! Have you seen
what a train can do to a human body?
Grotesque! I had to identify
Emil in his various pieces.
Only his signet ring was conclusive.

I thought, but thinking
in those days, as in any day

was not encouraged … I harboured doubts,
let's say, as to whether literature was the path
to tread, waiting for my mind to be pure or totally dead
among many high-strung fine-featured females,
who never once, not once, were seen naked and beguiling,
and who had no intention ever, never,
of becoming naked, or of being beguiling,
as they could have ... so easily done, the bitches,
by sliding happily, gloriously into bed,
by being nice to you, making the whole world
in a moment ten thousand times better.

They carry around their god-given bodies
nervously, without an ounce of comprehension:
words, words, so many words instead.

The mustachioed pale-faced gentlemen
held delicate scented handkerchiefs
to their bony twitching noses, ultra refined,
leaving no echo of the sweat the blood and stink
of Arminius, of the looming Nazi hooligans,
who were coming on, like Werner.

He came up to me at the ‘Babalanka’
one of these forgettable but fantastic
cosy places we used to love in Berlin:
fizzy very bad champagne on the tables,
young girls pretending to be loose and wild
while thinking about Papa, of their riding lessons
on the weekend. Hello, Jew.

That’s what he said. I was so incensed,
amused, I let him believe it. After that,
throughout all my outrageous spying forays,
he protected me. He thought I was a Jew homosexual,
not one but two counts against me. He was
visibly startled and in spite of himself, impressed.
After the war started, not long after,
the Yanks, the Irish, pushed out the boat of neutrality
while the Brits, Canadians and the rowdy Australians,
and even the quiet New Zealanders (all three),
swiftly skedaddled. I was able to pick up
some used furniture on the cheap. The Germans
were not keen on the idea of war. It was obvious
they hated the whole idea. Um Gottes Will,
they said, downing liters at the local, Was soll denn
das alles sein? (the fuck’s this all about then?)

So, no enthusiasm. None whatsoever.
I was scribbling all of this happily down
and sending it out through US embassy pouches
thanks to Nick and weird Oklahoma Julie
because the so-called Irish embassy was run by
one of our very own anti-British fascist manqué,
a total blinkered idiot, so shaming, you didn’t
even want to go to the receptions. But I did

occasionally, so that’s how I first met Hermann Goering.
I’d brought a wee tin whistle and that's what got him going.
I played a few tunes, a jig, a reel, and then a plaintive air
and the fat fucker just went berserk, mouthing off
about Aryan purity and asking me up for the weekend,
so I went off to his place up at Karinhall. My God!
You wouldn’t believe the luxury this fellow lived in,
wall-to-wall paintings and tapestries and sculptures
and the whole bloody house lined in marble. He was
on his best behaviour, slapping me on the back,
bad-mouthing the English, saying the Irish were so pure.

Idiot. The fuck he knows about the Irish.
Anything that happens outside of Germany,
these people simply don't have a clue, I mean,
look at Ribbentrop: he says “Heil Hitler” to the King.
Then he hates England because the English laugh at him.
I laugh at him too. That’s normal. Even the Germans
want to laugh at him but that, of course, is not allowed,
Strengst Verboten! not in a land where an unguarded remark
can send you straight to prison. I'm sorry I bought
the furniture; I really think I ought to leave.

I got back to Berlin and who’s sitting in my room,
there in the chair at the foot of my bed, but Werner?
The hell you doing here, I say, pass over my pajamas!
I have message for you, Bernd, you must send please.
O God, that’s how it started. Neutrality, I’d have to say,
went out the window. The Americans got chucked out
in ’41 after Pearl Harbor, the Irish stayed on. Not many.

By then we knew what side we were on. Oh, but listen,
must tell you! Must tell you about the time I met Herr Hitler
and taught him a few words of Irish, Conas ata tú,
which I hope, you know, he took with him to the grave
along with Eva Braun. He could have turned to her
in their last moments, smiled and said: Conas ata tú ?
How are you? How are you? How are you?
She'd have had no reply, she never did, I only met her
the one time and it was Hermann who introduced us,
and after that to some sly sarcastic little dwarf,
a very nasty little piece of work who faded out of the picture
after I’d challenged him to a foot race: a name with “b” or “g”.

Werner was gobsmacked when I left for Sweden
so casually in the winter of ’43. You could still do that then,
even after Stalingrad. The truth hadn’t quite hit them.
I met him after the war in Hamburg, running a bar on the Reeperbahn.
People like Werner never go under, they just bob to the surface
while others are dying in droves all around them. They flourish,
eat well, screw and drink. He looked at me cagily, benevolently,
still thinking I was a corkscrew Jew so I pretended to kiss him,
but his smile went rigid when I whispered in his ear.
Crooks (this is the good thing) don't write books.

390. Germany Annihilates Argentina 4-0

2010-07-07T01:42:00.000+09:00

Golly, this is no joke any more!

I am nearly praying for a Holland-Germany Final!!

389. Germany Demolishes England 4-1

2010-06-28T13:40:00.002+09:00

So much for a rivalry. Germany made certain just who the better soccer club was Sunday by sending England off the pitch hanging their heads and on the bitter end of a 4-1 defeat in the first round of the knockout rounds of the 2010 World Cup. England controlled the tempo early on but could not overcome some precise ball movement from Germany and an unrewarded goal as Germany asserted themselves as the top team for at least one day.

Germany struck first blood when Miroslav Klose, who missed Germany's 1-0 victory over Ghana due to suspension, made his impact. Klose nudged the ball past England goalkeeper David James twenty minutes in. the score brought Klose three goals away from a tie for the all-time World Cup scoring record, held by Ronaldo of Brazil. Klose had made it clear that he intended to at least tie the record during this World Cup.

Miroslav Klose slots in Germany's first in the 20th minute

Twelve minutes later Lukas Podolski scored an incredible goal at a very tough angle, just barely hitting the far corner of the goal to put Germany up 2-0. England was quick to respond with a goal of their own, coming from Matthew Upson on a header roughly five minutes later. Then controversy took center stage as England's Frank Lampard kicked a ball off the cross bar of the German goal. The ball landed behind the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer and should have been a clear goal to tie the match (more on this goal below), but the refs failed to see where the ball landed. With no video replay system in order with FIFA the score remained 2-1 in favor of Germany.

England attempted a furious come back in the second half but Germany showed better athleticism and a better scheme to solidly put England away. On a free kick by England's Lampard the Germans defended nicely and created a 3-on-1 rush up field to the England goal. Thomas Müller capitalized on the rush by notching his first goal of the match to put Germany up 3-1 with 67 minutes played. Just three minutes later Müller once again scored a goal to put Germany up 4-1. At that point it was clear that Germany was going to cruise to the next round as England appeared deflated.

It did appear clear that with the first half winding down, England had in fact tied the match at two goals a piece. A shot by Frank Lampard hit the cross bar and landed clearly behind the goal line, as seen on television cameras, by at least a foot. Regardless, the refs missed the goal as they were behind the play and had a poor angle.

In this combination image composed of five photos, Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer looks at the ball hitting the bar and bouncing over the line during the World Cup round of 16 soccer match between Germany and England at Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Sunday, June 27, 2010. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)

England never scored again and allowed two more goals the rest of the way so one might say the unrewarded goal would not have changed anything. But to argue that would be ridiculous as the whole course of a game could have been altered if England had gone in to the half tied with Germany, rather than trailing and needing to press more for a goal. England came out in the second half on a mission and played the more aggressive soccer, but they may have used up all of their energy in efforts to tie the match. Had the game been correctly tied then England could have played a different style in the second half, before running out of energy and seeing Germany blitz past them.

-- report from Kevin McGuire at Germany Football Examiner, June 27

388. Why Are We Not Surprised Dept.

2010-06-25T15:50:00.000+09:00

A post by David Beaver on the site Language Log:

First, a new twist on a story that our legal desk covered back in February: at the annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony earlier tonight, the Prize for Literature was awarded to the Garda Síochána na hÉireann (i.e. the Irish Police Force) for the 50 or more speeding tickets they've issued in the name "Prawo Jazdy", Polish for "driver's license."

387. Feeling Sorry for the French

2010-06-23T20:31:00.001+09:00

Come to think of it, I don't feel that sorry at all. The Irish team should have been there instead of you. They would have done better. They couldn't possibly have done worse. Somebody (not me) put a right good curse on the French team. Now it's the long trip home, if they'll have you, in shame and disgrace. That's what you get for cheating, Thierry me bhoy, with your double handball, and you Domenech, FIFA and all the rest of yez. None of my doing, as I said above, but these things have a way of working themselves out. I take no delight in it but confess to no surprise.

386. Holland-Japan and the Night

2010-06-22T01:35:00.002+09:00

It was good craic for the night that was in it ... so let's get on to the visuals.

Fu'ball at Marty's Kitchen & at Mehmet's KK

Click on the title under the picture above and you get sent to the slideshow in two moves: you need to click on the "Slideshow" button in the top left corner when the next screen arrives.