TIGER BAY
How long have they sat there,
Unnoticed?
Granite haunches
Tensed in the sand
Brunting the snarling sea
Washed over again and again
Licking endless salt wounds away.
From these high cliffs I see them clearly
Wild creatures
Waiting patiently for prey
Yesterday it was desolate;
Now there are tigers in the bay
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Brendan O’Brien
Brendan O’Brien and the Dixies were up there with Brendan Bowyer and the Royal Showband, The Clipper Carlton, (the best in my humble opinion) The Plattermen, Joe Dolan, Dickie Rock and The Miami, and had legions of followers prepared to travel the length and breadth of Ireland just to watch them perform.Learning of Brendan’s death brought back long forgotten memories of the night we understudied the Dixies at the Olympia Ballroom in Waterford city. It was sometime in the mid 1960’s. Continue reading
Hunter S Thompson at work
UNTITLED
Nights when we were young
We raced the wind;
Banshees in our wake
Dracula lying in wait.
We had left him oozing blood
From the stake wedged in his chest
In the Rainbow Cinema.
But with vampires you could never tell
Hair slicked back, stiff with Brylcreem,
Newly perched on our Raleigh three-speeds
(with dynamo)
We explored the world,
Our winkle-pickers pointing the way.
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Elvis and Charlie having a coffee break on Hollywood Boulevard during our visit there recently! Undoubtably the holiday of our lives; saw Santa Monica, Malibou Beach, Venice Beach etc, ect – and of course Hollywood. I have definitely fallen in love with LA!
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LOVE POEM FROM BONMAHON
God in his heaven never bettered this;
Never hit perfection more square-on.
Rugged cliffs lip the strand,
Opening to fields behind,
The Atlantic, white-layered,
Sweeping into the bay,
Its hurry washed-out
By the tug of sand, gently rising,
Before it.
A tangle of marram crowns the dunes,
Tousled, like windswept hair;
Whilst, on the slopes nearby,
A line of white cottages
Vie for prominence with the old church
Yet, it is the call of the waves
That steals most of the aces;
Those rider-less white horses
Sweeping relentlessly in,
With their whispering lisps;
‘I love you, please don’t go,
I love you please don’t go’
And I, watching the ebb-tide dragging them back,
Silently mouthing in their wake;
‘She loves me, she loves me not,
She loves me, she loves me not…’
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This old photo – courtesy of Waterford Co. Museum – show locals enjoying their bottles of Guinness in Ciss Kirwan’s pub in Bonmahon Co Waterford, Ireland c 1950. I grew up not half a dozen miles from Bonmahon, and I think it is my favourite spot in the world. Well it was until we visited LA last year! A seaside village in what is now called The Copper Coast region, it was in its heyday in the 19th C a thriving copper-mining area. Then the copper ran out and all that eventually was left was a warren of mineshafts and a decaying main street where most of the houses had either fallen down or were knocked down. Once the copper had gone most of the people left too.
I t was our mecca in the summer though; we cycled there most Summer Sundays, content to play football and other games on the long sandy beach or climb the pathways to the gently rising cliffs at either end of the village. The river Mahon split it in two and a cumbersome old metal bridge also provided further opportunites to clamber between the struts and girders hidden beneath the tarmac and cement laid on top of them.
As we got older we took our transistor radios with us and listened to the velvet tones of Brian Hyland as we sat on the rocks overlooking the bay. I only met you just a couple of days ago/I only met you and I want your lovin’ so Jeannie come lately, you may have come lately/ But you’re the one for me. Or Susan Maughan. I want to be Bobby’s girl, I want to be Bobby’s girl/ That’s the most important thing to me/ And if I was Bobby’s girl, if I was Bobby’s girl/ What a happy faithful girl I’d Be.Of course it wouldn’t be long before the girls appeared, insinuating themselves between us. I am sure it was all planned where they would sit, but at the time we didn’t have sense enough to cop on, thus many an opportunity of a bit of innocent canoodling was missed. Part of the enjoyment was going to Ciss Kirwan’s and stuffing ourselves with bottles of Cidona and bags of Tayto crisps. 
Yes, glory days.
Pett Level,Winchelsea
THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
He lay in the box quite comfortably
His waxen face staring into infinity
Looking much better in death
Than he ever had in life.
It was all that I could do to peer
At him through slatted fingers
From the back of the room;
The ever-present smell of tanning
And leather aprons absent now;
More than forty seeping years of it
Scrubbed away one last time
His moped – a natural progression from pedal power
When his legs gave out –
Lay discarded in the coal shed
At the back of the house.
(No driver you see, and mother still had the shopping to do)
He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,
And turned over his bit of stony ground endlessly.
In summer he clipped sheep slowly
With a machine bought by post from Clerys,
Carefully stowing it away in its box
When the shearing was done.
The clay pipes he sucked on – their broken stems
Held together with blood pricked from his thumb –
Were redundant now
And his three bottles of Sunday-night Guinness
Would stand corked under the counter evermore.
Who would dance half-sets with her now?
My mother enquired of no one in particular,
The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him
Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.
He lay there with a smile on his face
Knowing it was over
And I never got to know what was on his mind.
We put him in the ground
And sadness trickled through me
Like a handful of sand through my fingers.
Later, everyone stood around
Eating sparse ham sandwiches
While I stood there, dry-eyed;
He was a great man they all said
Slapping the back of my overcoat;
Sure he gave forty years to that tannery
And what did it give him?
I wanted to shout to the throng;
A gold watch and a tin tray
And both had his name spelled wrong
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My latest book, now available on Amazon.
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OLD ACQUAINTANCE
I see they have sent him down – again
A two stretch this time
I sold a typewriter for him once
And got six months for my trouble
(he got three, but swore it was my idea)
Then there was the time he
Asked me to burn his house down
‘Two hundred quid’ he said ‘easy money’
‘The insurance won’t twig it’
(when I declined, he did the job himself)
After that we lost contact for several years
He removed his wife and daughters to another town,
Where he was just as big a bastard – to them –
And to the world in general
Drinking, gambling, big-mouthing and beating,
Mostly his wife,
Till she put a slit near his throat
With a carving knife
Left to his own devices
He hung misery about him like a shroud;
He went to Knock for a week
And returned a changed man
Flowers from Interflora, presents for the girls,
Flannel for everyone else.
She relented of course.
They don’t speak much about him in the town now
A nudge and a wink
When his wife appears;
‘She must have known what was going on…
Doing that with his girls….
And she had him back!’
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