ECLIPSE – WHAT ECLIPSE?
Here’s a picture
Of the one I didn’t see
This morning
On the West Hill
Clouded out, the sun hid itself well
From old New Age-rs
And others whose persuasion
I couldn’t tell
(Though the clothes were more hippy than hip)
And we gathered in some dog viewers as well
What any of us expected I don’t quite know
But an eclipse was a definite no-show
Perhaps a second coming
Or a burning fire in the sky
With a voice booming out over the hill
Repent or die! Repent or die!
PECKER DUNNE- LAST OF THE TRAVELLERS
A play with music about the travelling musicians of Ireland, mostly concentrating on Pecker Dunne and Margaret Barry. They were both from travelling families, Tinkers, and were marginalised by Irish society. Looked down on, indeed persecuted for their way of life. Both were great singers and musicians, and along with the great Johnny Doran, did more to promote Irish traditional music than almost any other person of our times. Both are dead now and the play is set in a kind of imaginary ‘halting site’, where departed souls are temporarily resident while awaiting transport to somewhere permanent.
‘I never met Bob Dylan but I sang with Pecker Dunne’ Christy Moore
extract from the play:
Scene one
A darkened stage, then a spotlight. PECKER DUNNE appears, carrying a banjo case. The case has Pecker Dunne stencilled across the body. Bearded, he wears a wide black leather belt with silver buckle on his trousers, and could be anywhere between 40/60 years of age. He sings I’M THE LAST OF THE TRAVELLIN PEOPLE (c) Pecker Dunne)
PD: Me name it is Paddy, I’m called Pecker Dunne
I walk the road but I never run,
I’m the last of the travellin’ people
With me banjo and fiddle I yarn and song,
and sing to people who do me no wrong
But if others despise me I just move along,
and know I’ll find friends in the morning
Arah money is money and friends they are friends,
And drinking with them is where all money ends
But it isn’t on money it’s on them I depend
When friends and the guards are against me.
From Belfast to Wexford from Clare to Tralee,
a town with a pub is a living for me
I haven’t a home but thank God I am free,
I’m the last of the travellin’ people
The road isn’t aisy but it’s what I choose,
I’m not always a winner but I’ll never lose
I’m the pride of me race, I’m the last of the few,
and I live like my father taught me
Now I’m on the road again travellin’ still,
Summer and winter keep travelling I will
But the road it is long and I know it will kill
The last of the travelling people.
As Pecker finishes the stage lights come up. There is a blank screen as backdrop. Towards the front we see what looks to be a travellers halting site; campfire, cooking utensils etc – the impression being given is that the wagons etc are just out of sight. It should be a hazy, sort of unreal-looking place, with a few people seated at various points. Some of these can be musicians.
PD: Where the bloody hell is this place?
On screen we can now read HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY PECKER.
PD: Birthday? Eighty? What’s goin’ on here?
MARGARET BARRY appears from the mist with her banjo. She sings THE GALWAY SHAWL (traditional)
MB: At Oranmore in the County Galway,
One pleasant evening in the month of May,
I spied a damsel, she was young and handsome
Her beauty fairly took my breath away.
Chorus:
She wore no jewels, nor costly diamonds,
No paint or powder, no, none at all.
But she wore a bonnet with a ribbon on it
And round her shoulder was a Galway Shawl.
We kept on walking, she kept on talking,
‘Till her father’s cottage came into view.
Says she, “Come in, sir, and meet my father,
And play to please him The Foggy Dew.”
She sat me down beside the fire
I could see her father, he was six feet tall.
And soon her mother had the kettle singing
All I could think of was the Galway shawl.
I played The Blackbird and The Stack of Barley
Rodney’s Glory and The Foggy Dew
She sang each note like an Irish linnet.
Whilst the tears stood in her eyes of blue.
‘Twas early, early, all in the morning,
When I hit the road for old Donegal.
She said goodbye, sir, she cried and kissed me,
And my heart remained with that Galway shawl.
ON BRINDLED MOOR
On Brindled Moor there is a nothingness
That only a bog can invoke
And this vast Hebridean peat bog
Articulates un-knowingness
Saying, there is nothing here,
Only what the eye can’t see.
This brown earth, stunned out of wonder,
With its wandering watercourses
Running through the peat; a feit,
Which resembles veins or sinews,
A bugha, a green bow-shaped sweep of moor grass,
Formed by the winding of the stream;
A rionnach maoim, casting shadows
On the moorland by clouds moving
Across the sky on a bright, windy day,
Lighting up what is suddenly
Not empty or meaningless at all.
Here we have chucky,clitter and fedster
Pipkrares and shuckle
Muxy rout and slunk,
And migrant birds arriving from distant places.
‘It is time to sing the world back into being
That static things may be caught
In the very act of becoming’
Rimbaud in Harar – Arthur Rimbaud – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia// // //
Arthur Rimbaud was born in the Arnennes in France in 1854.He influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism/ He started writing poems at a very young age, while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his teens (17–20). His “genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes”.Rimbaud was known to have been a Libertine and for being a restless soul. He traveled extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.
“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud
THE SLEEPER IN THE VALLEY
| It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles, Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses; Where the sun shines from the proud mountain: It is a little valley bubbling over with light.A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed, With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses, Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky, Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain. His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as No odour makes his nostrils quiver; Arthur Rimbaud October 1870
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LOS ANGELES
From dream factory
To nightmare landscape
Eternally self-renewing
And all but used up,
The hot LA nights
Spiked with a Santa Ana wind,
Capote, Faulkner, Mailer, Fitzgerald, et al
Haunting the many-faceted gin-mills,
Looking for characters
For the books they were soon to write,
Hockney hobbling to
The marijuana store
To smoke away his many ailments,
Drinking Chai tea with the other lunatics,
Down Venice way
The ancient muscle men on Muscle Beach
Doing press-ups
And pull-ups that demean them,
Hollywood writ large on the hills
And a jaded sign on Santa Monica pier
Saying ‘Route 66 ends here’.
MAURA DOOLEY
HISTORY
It’s only a week but already you are slipping
Down cold black chute of history. Postcards.
.Phonecalls. It’s like never having seen the Wall,
Except in pieces on the dusty shelves of friends.
Once I queued for hours to see the moon in a box
Inside a museum, so wild it should have been kept
In a zoo at least but there it was, unremarkable,
A pile of dirt some god had shaken down.
I wait for your letters now: a fleet of strange cargo
With news of changing borders, a heart’s small
Journeys. They’re like the relicts of a saint.
Opening the dry white papers is kissing a bone.
THE WALL
I stopped by our wall again today
Staring
Just staring
I saw an image of you
Fleeting
As you hurried by
It was like somebody
Had stood on my grave
You in all your finery
Mirrored on a blank wall
Blank
Just like your face.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
The Wild West has migrated east
The Middle East near and far
Where the horse has been superseded
By the pick-up, the land cruiser and the car
They race across vast deserts firing bullets in the air
If there’s a name on any bullet
Well, no one seems to care
Shooting up the town was once the pastime of the bad guys
Now it is blowing up the houses
And killing little girls and boys.
The bombs rain down on everyone and everything
Where once it was just arrows
Fired by some pesky redskin
Looking down the barrel of a gun
Can be intimidating
When it’s eighteen foot long
There are no six-guns or shotguns any more
But rocket launchers, machine guns
And others of such enormous bore
Playing cowboys and Indians was once a pleasant game
But when your opponent must be beheaded
Then it isn’t quite the same.
DECIBELISATION
Decibelisation was already old
When Dresden’s china first charred the ashes;
When the war to end all wars
Turned Flanders’s field to poppies,
And when Cromwell’s convoys rattled
The cobbled streets of old Kilkenny.
And still the echos throb today.
CIVIL SERVANTS SHOULD NOT LEAK
He said it, my God he said it!
Brazen-faced, to the watching nation
‘They should not leak’, he said
‘After all, they are servants of the Crown’.
Leaking in public? How revolting!
And where would it begin?
A seepage from the ears perhaps?
Or a welling-up from beneath
All those virginal starched collars?
Or would it occur in the nether regions?
Visible only as a steady trickle
Down around the ankles.
A telephoned enquiry brought no joy;
‘I can assure you, Sir, we have
No leaking Civil Servants here
Why don’t you try MI 5’
My Writing Life 