421. traditions

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.