452: RWC - Ireland into the Quarter Finals

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

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

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

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

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447. Dublin Rambler Slide Show

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

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!

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

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)

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442. Oisín - the Irish band!

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441. "On the Continong"

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440. Edinburgh

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439. London Calling

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438. China (mostly Peking) Slide Show

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437. The Dublin Rambler

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436.5. Little Miss Morimoto

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!!

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

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

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