GOOD KARMA

Were living in such a volatile, fragile

state of consumerism, everything

is based on ego/image. I think to-

day we have to be so careful

we don’t slip into the gutter?

While writing this I’m looking at a man-

dala a representation of my soul like

a flower in bloom, a circle within

a circle within a circle, ‘good karma’. 

Imagine there’s a spiritual shop, good

karma. Weve come a long way from

the bleak negativity of the past.

I dont think we can go back to the tit-

for-tat killings, waking in that neg-

ativity everyday.  Weve had a few years

of peace in this country, let’s not slip back

into that past.  

The beautiful thing was the girl who done 
the representation of my soul never once 
asked me what religion I was
thats the way life should be. 

Exploring space

I want to start this essay with a quote by the great Hungarian poet Attila József from the poem A Pure Heart. I was in Hungary for 4 weeks in Szeged, Sólyok, Pécs and Budapest there was poetry echoing from every pore of the country.  I had a wonderful time arranged by Szeged University and the British Council, thanks to Andrea and Gabriella for making my trip so memorable. We travelled by train to Lake Balaton and I was inspired by the scenery. There's a painting beside me, I just finished it's a self-portrait, but it reminds me of looking at the statue of Attila Jozesf in Szeged.

From within a pure heart,
I am fatherless, motherless,
Godless and countryless,
have no cradle, no funeral shroud. 
And no lover to kiss me proud.

Poetry and painting come from the same place; one is silent, mute, while the other whispers in your ear or yells at the top of its voice. They are both tiny snippets that come right out of the blue. I hope my poetry shows a subtle tinge of light from it like my favourite painting is Van Gogh “the potato eaters” even in its stark reality there is a tiny flicker of light just enough to show the expression of the family especially the little girl who's back is to us I bet she is beautiful with a pure heart. The light he captures is amazing.

Poetry is written in their eyes, in the thoughts of others they say always see the other persons perscptive this painting is a great example of this it's as if Van Gogh was telling us to wise up and put yourself in their shoes, if we'd had done that we wouldn't be living with a thirty year war, all the wasted blood that has been spilt..

Anna Akmatova wrote, the clean wind lulls in the fir trees, the clean snow sweeps the fields, my land is at rest and no longer hears the tramp of enemy boots. My favourite poem of all time is Robert Lowell's, Epilogue for me, It captures the same essence as The Potato Eaters.

Robert Lowell - Epilogue
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make 
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice: 
The painter's vision is not a lens; it trembles to caress the light. 
But sometimes everything I write 
with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life, 
yet paralysed by fact. 
All's misalliance. 
Yet why not say what happened? 
Pray for the grace of accuracy 
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination 
stealing like the tide across a map 
to his girl, solid with yearning.
We are poor at passing facts, 
warned by that to give 
each figure in the photograph 
its living name.

This poem represents all forms of art. I hope you see it among what you have created. Hopefully, one day I will be able to create something as beautiful as this. This essay seems to reflect what I have to say about words, so I'll just ramble on about my love of poetry and art.

Good writing comes from the heart and informs you what you want to hear. Everything relates to you, the reader. I see myself sitting at the table eating potatoes. I have endeavoured my whole life that one day I will capture the true light that Van Gogh caught in that painting; he was a true master.

When your flat on your back in intensive care and only able to move your eyes you, death knocking on your door you have time to put things away and deal with the proper issues, I'm very lucky that I'm still here writing imagine Raymond Carver after he was told by the doctor that he had tumours on the brain.

What The Doctor Said

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact, real bad he
said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before 
I quit counting them 
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know 
about any more being there than that 
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down 
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help 
when you come to a waterfall 
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments 
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said 
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do 
and not wanting him to have to repeat it and me to have to fully digest it 
I just looked at him 
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong 
- Raymond Carve.r

Look at Norman I have to mention my friend Norman who is in a nursing home, he was in hospital with me he will be in a wheelchair the rest of his life for trying to stop a car from being stolen, poor Norman my thoughts are always with you, Patricia his sister and Gavin his brother-in-law, it's not until something like this happens that you realise your life has some purpose some meaning.

Music was a big influence on my life when I was younger I wanted to write a good lyric then I came across poetry James and Janice Simmons pointed me in the right direction, before that day that Jimmy sat me down at his computer to show me how to edit a poem, I had the story but it was all jumbled up in my head. Thanks for un-cluttering my system.

Poems appear right out of the blue. I don't want to know where they come from; keep the mystery alive, then I can put the book of poetry back on the shelf and read it another day. I can read and re-read again and again.  I have always been an observer ever since I saw my reflection when I was a child in that tiny puddle of water on the street. I wanted to let my mother's hand go and drown in it, and this is my drowning.

My mother never once said Adrian, you can't do that like other mothers do, and to this day, I have a problem with authority. It's been almost a year since my stroke. A year of people telling me what to do, it's time for breakfast, you get washed at this time, and you go to the toilet even if you're not in the mood. The body has to make way for all these changes. You go from being a happy-go-lucky free spirit to a control freak. It's hard not to be the person they have controlled. Poems come from a spring, a source, take a sip of the pure stuff that falls from high up, and you will also fall in love with words. Patrick Kavanagh was right when he said, “Poetry is the birth of young life and the cry of elemental beings”.

To understand what I mean, I have included a verse of his.

Patrick Kavanagh-- Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do 
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, 
Grow with nature again as before I grew. 
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third 
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat, 
and a bird gathering materials for the nest, for the Word 
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web 
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib 
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech 
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proved.

This is a beautiful poem, a man truly in love with the world. I'm en-captured in his web of poetry, thank you, Patrick. He snares me in his web of thought. I hope his poetry captures you.  They become images in my head, I can see him and Dublin in the 1940s and 1950s. My mother grew up not far from there, so the poem holds a certain magic for me.  I can't write this essay without the inclusion of Wilfred Owen's poem. This is Wilfred Owen's regeneration; it will live on and on, reminding us that this can't happen again. Someone once said you have to be in touch with the past to know the future. Wilfred Owen knew his future in this poem, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) Dulce Et Decorum Est 
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 
, but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots 
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. 
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie:

Cherry

I'll include Dulce et decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

I have to begin this new day with an email from my beautiful friend/poet Cherry Smyth. She captures what I am trying to say in this essay, that's why I love her very much, she is more than just a friend, she is my soul mate.

Dear Adrian,

I was staying in bed to read and write the other morning, and re-read 'Prose on Poetry' by Raymond Carver about the morning he discovered there was such a thing as a poetry journal. It made me weep. It made me remember that unique charge that being part of poetry gives me, and it's not about prizes and the intellect or being flavour of the month - it's about soul. It's about the beauty of the page with space around words and a glimpse into someone else's heart, something that moves where you expected stillness or even death. His work so reminds me of you: your robustness, your vulnerability, your beauty, your dogged honesty. Do keep writing. Keep to what's around you.

Tell me about your day. Are you getting out enough? Are you reading much? Painting? I love this time of year because I work till about 5.30pm and then see it's 6.30pm and I didn't realise the light was going later. It's like looking up and seeing a face you love at the window. The light.

Love as always

Here is one of her poems to let you know how good and how original she is with words. I love this poem.

The Funnel
The time of the sparrows, their ratchet of sound 
an unoiled mechanical panic. “Hurry home,” 
they say. Kiss quick. Drink. Dance. What
a calamity. It's too late. All the days undoing 
in their beaks, closing in as the land throws peaches
into the sky and a Turner unfolds overhead 
in gold and baby blue and a pink she couldn't wear.
Clouds build a Sahara sand, rivers and ridges
no foot will ever touch. Are we compelled to watch
eye to eye with one great art to practice dying?

Litter scatters over the mountain, an open torso 
dried out and bloodless. Three lights spring up
on a bungalow. Taillights pick out the road 
I followed, a red ball rolling down a gutter.
Her face after the dance performance, 
bodies in tableaux of every human pain, 
grotesque and gullible on that ledge of love. 
She looked blasted in this landscape and pretty 
. I was glad to have her, uncopied, not as a picture 
or as the image I have of her face at the edge 
of the earth, after too much consciousness, her eyes
shut, lips baring the night song she's worked 
from the days without colour, coming back alive
for those who have found sense in grey.


CHERRY SMYTH

I will end this essay by saying thank you to my friends and family, you know who you are, and to all the staff at the Royal, Forster Green and the Joss Carwell centre for rehabilitating my painting rests on the wall of the new unit at Musgrave Park. Thanks to Duncan for having faith in me. I would also like to thank everyone at Cheshire Mews for looking after me. I will conclude this essay with a quote from Attila József, the same quote I began with. May every art form be inspired by this.

You should read my poems.



For silence in your dreams has taken on a human form. 

The Spiritual Path of Destruction

I’m not saying don’t believe in your creator, because that belief holds the essence of good in the world. I just want to get closer to what Albert Camus said: we are all in this bloody century together and that should be argument enough to stop the killing.  When it comes to religion, I’m like the guy with the bag and shovel taking a bit of this and a bit of that—mixing them all together to create my pick and mix. Let’s call mine art. It seems that’s what I get off on. 

Let’s stop bickering about the suspending violence and just stop the killing. I was watching spiritual leaders in favour of Hezbollah and I felt very frustrated. Being from Northern Ireland, I wake every day to the same rhetoric of violence spilling from the same mouths. These are supposed to be people who believe,or god and Ulster, we create violence and mayhem.

Look at what is happening in Lebanon at the minute—a country created by the worst violence in the world. Millions have died. The world bickers about the meaning of a word that will stop the conflict. In the meantime, innocent people die until they get it right. Stop this please. Israel, you were created from the worst atrocity in the world. I know your trouble goes back hundreds of years, but I believe in humanity and this is my way of saying stop the violence.

I don’t know where I stand when the word god is uttered. I’m jealous of people that believe. I have a belief, too. It’s called art and this is my only way of expressing how I feel. I know we are close to Albert Camus’ words now that there is peace in Northern Ireland.  I bet Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, never considered that there was a crèche in the building before he blew it up—I’m not saying he was right no taking of life is right, the system wasn’t working for him. He was bringing the war home to America to show them how evil it can be, he seen women and children mamed and killed so he thought he had no other choice. I bet Osama Bin Laden had been cooking up his scheme for years before he put it into action.  Look at George Bush, Tony Blair and the right wing fundamentalists—they believe they are right and in the name of god they are doing his work. 

Someone once said, never hate your enemy—it clouds your judgement. Religion and politics shouldn’t be uttered in the same breath because they are too big an entity ever to be satisfied unless you’re a glutton for punishment. Let’s stop clouding our judgement. Let’s stop the bombings. We’re like children with toys—my bombs are better than yours. Mine can kill 28 innocent fruit pickers. Yours can only kill 22.  Let’s get on with the real issues that face humanity. Let’s forget Iraq and America, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland and the Republic—or any other country you want to bomb.  Look at the money we’re wasting and the resources we could use to end the worlds poverty. We should be dropping money instead of bombs. War is being treated like a commodity.

I grew up in North Belfast—Ardoyne. I’ve had my fill of who’s right and who’s wrong and I’ve noticed it’s always the innocent that die. Oh he or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you idiots weren’t messing around with murderous toys we wouldn’t be hurt.  Americans deal with war by getting in an aeroplane on one side of the world and flying to the other to drop a bomb. They are home again for their television sitcom. War is not a commodity that capitalists trade in.  Don’t let belief interfere. Anything you do behind closed doors is up to you, just respect the other person. Let’s stop this triviality. Embrace capitalism as long as it doesn’t hurt others. We just follow like sheep and the shepherds are those in power.

Here are my words—my way of saying, “Wise up, boys. We are ruining this beautiful accident. 

”do you know that we have never had one day of peace on this earth ever? Let’s change this.

PARTY part 1.  PLACEBO EFFECT    (this is not the blues)

Ever since I came to the shores of Ireland, I have lived in the exploited and abused world of Christianity, not knowing where I stood in Catholicism or Protestantism.

I always felt outside the realms of spirituality, although I find inner peace in my art.  Poetry and painting hold the essence of 

Enlightenment for me, so let’s call it poetry. On my trek 

Throughout life, I have found my own sense of inner peace in reading. 

poetry by Raymond Carver, and others like him, where water 

Comes together with other water for me is a very spiritual 

Through experience and in the reading of that poem, I became the river in 

Harmony with nature.  I am sitting there beside that river. 

meandering through life, flowing by the rapids and along the calm 

Stretches.  Through the words of Raymond Carver, I am one with 

The river (funi), as the Buddhist’s call it, is oneness. I feel the same. 

When I read Mary Oliver's or Sharon Olds’ Chezslaw Milosz or 

Robert Lowell, or look at a beautiful piece of art by Van Gogh, or a 

A piece that stirs emotion.  What was it that Robert Lowell said, 

‘Language is the imperfection of art, and we must use our craft to 

Create something beautiful. I have lived in Northern Ireland since I 

I 

I was a young boy, and I have always wanted to put my Allegiance 

Somewhere it was sore on my arse, sitting there on the fence back. 

And forth, but it took all that time of confusion for things to settle in. 

My mind. I’m not saying that any killing is right, it is not right to 

Take life.  All this trouble could have been over a lot sooner.  

Christianity always came across as very negative to me, and I think. 

In this world of negativity, we have to be very careful that we don’t 

Get corrupted by consumerism, I think the young people have lost. 

Respect because they are drowning in consumerism, and there is no. 

One left to help them.

It’s about time we wised up and stopped this disrespectful dog-eat-dog society we live in; it’s about time the government did something.  Christianity has torn this country apart, and organised religion still rings its god damned bells.  I believe in most of what Buddhism has to say, at least positively.

My poetry and the poetry I read will be chanted like a mantra that finds my centre. This is the way I have found to say my thing and be accepted in this world.  I believe everyone has a story, whether they're directing a film by someone else, it’s their slant they are bringing to the screen. There’s a little piece of them in everything they do just like there’s a little piece of you in everything you do, I want my poems to be like an everyday item say a tea bag, this is my tea bag and I hope someday you’ll lift it and read it and take my experience of that poem with you.  While you’re making that cup of tea, remember we are the same kind of people.  What are the sayings, love like you mean it, dance as if no one is watching, I could go on, but you get the gist.   I dare you to tell them you love them, do something to let them know you love them, the beauty in life is we don’t have the answers and we don’t know what tomorrow brings so make the most of the moment.  as Jarvis Cocker sings go on and give it to her the next click of your fingers could be your last so live like you mean it, go on and give it to her it might just last forever you know it’s now or never, the birds in your garden are all singing your song. As I said before, I don't have the answers to life. I am searching like you.  I think the only ones with answers are those who have kicked the bucket passed away to the other side, however you want to say it.  I woke from this terrible ordeal (the stroke) with my friends and family around me I was lucky, get in touch with them now not tomorrow we don’t know what will happen in the next moment, poetry and painting is like that in fact all forms of art is like that an expression of our feelings a placebo effect.

A MAN WOKE IN A HOSPITAL BED WITHOUT ANY MEMORY
BUT HE FOUND THIS WRIT.

1967

Pat looked from the third-floor window of the block of council flats.

They stood with a modernised version. 

of a round tower protruding from the front 
with a stairwell and rubbish chute 
that led to each landing.  

The doors and window frames were painted 

the same blood red, adding to 

the melancholic look blending 

with red brick.  

She watched in the distance 

as the rusted bridge parted 

and ascended into a grey sky

separating like the jaws of a giant 

swallowing a cargo ship flowing 

along the dark Thames.

While watching the typical dismal London view

as if in a trance, she wrapped an ornamental figurine, unaware

that she was twisting the newspaper so tightly it was tearing.

'Am I doing the right thing?', she asked herself

'I will miss my family, ' she said in an almost silent whisper.

A look of sadness came across her face

on those usually smiling Irish eyes, with

the painful hurt within.

It's best for the children, she told her-
self shaking her head as if awakening 
from a hypnotic trance. She wrapped 

the figurine in another sheet of news-
paper and placed it in the half-
filled t-chest.  

The pictures were removed from the walls like 

Unstained stamps of approval to vacate 

the premises.  While waiting for the tea-

pot on the glowing flame to brew, her hands 

delved into the sink of dishes.  Without drying, 

she returned to the almost bare room, relaxing 

on the sofa, and she placed her hot cuppa 

on the mantle above the cold fire.

She shot forward as if struck by sudden pain 
her backside clung to the edge of the seat 
trying not to think of the grief of her
Brother was just 27 when he fell to his death, her sisters 
and her widowed mother.

She would leave them all behind. My children are the ones that matter, no, John is right, we can't raise them in this country, at least in Ireland, they will keep their innocence a little longer.

     The memory of her childhood in Dublin came flooding back.


Dressed in a drab tunic with pigtails in her hair and a glowing smile on her face.  Little Jimmy skipped and jumped beside her along the Dodder River that ran through Rathmines, south of the city.

They rested on one of the benches just feet from the river's edge. A wild, majestic white swan went by, and wild little Jimmy jumped in and grabbed it by its feet. He was so quick that both she and the great bird were startled.

In a frantic state, the great bird tried to free itself from the boy’s grip, honking, hissing madly, flapping its outstretched wings.  With great effort,t the bird took off from the water with little Jimmy hanging from it.  Pat stood on the verge yelling, ng Jimmy, let go, please let go. Jimmy was a wild care carefree little boy without fear in his bones. He shouted Patty, look at me, I’m flying, let the bird go and splashed into the water, smiling beyond its city grime.

His voice echoed through her mind as he fell through childhood, teenage years with a constant smile and that thick mop of naturally curly hair rolled into a teddy boy quiff, just twenty-seven, he lay on the ground at the foot of the ladder propped up against the office building.  A leather shammy lay beside him. He wore a brand new pair of leather-soled winkle picker shoes, dressed for the part.

In a pin-striped sharp suit, he planned to hit the city and bop the night away with his friends.

The memory of her father came blurred in a free-state army uniform, who also died aged twenty-seven.  I miss you two she spoke aloud, her total concentration absorbed in the memories of the past. Sobbing, wiping the tears from her eyes, she remembered those days after their death; these they clung to her mind.  Written on her poor Mothers face, mixed with the hardship 

of trying to make ends meet on a

pittance army pension and a measly 

wage for cleaning the houses of the rich. 

She remembered what her mother said, soaking 

her fluid-filled tired feet in a basin 

of water and mustard powder

‘If I stay, my sons will end up 

in trouble with the poli’.

Worn down on the path of reality, filled with the grief of losing a husband and son, hauling their memory through her aching heart.  The days of hardship drove them to these shores, and the days of Ireland growing into a nation of independence, thereby rendering life extremely difficult for the poor.

The news of England carried across the Irish sea, where you could earn three times what Ireland. "Why do we always remember the hard times she thought, I’m going back to where I came and looked down into her empty cup, reading tea leaves like her mother, looking for hope.

 BASTARD TOWN

Pat sat softly sobbing

holding her head in her hands.  Peter, her youngest, left his bedroom where he played dreamily, feeling. 

His mother's sadness, he ran his fingers through her hair and held her, saying I love you, mum,  holding each other in a true embrace.  Peter's statement broke the silence and brought her back to earth, with a smile 'Can I have a piece of bread and jam, he said.   

Peter's father entered the flat 

and changed the room's atmosphere.  

Peter knew his father hated him 

He felt it, he said Peter was too sensitive 

and needed too much attention, but 

He was just true, and his father 

who lived a lie couldn't handle the truth.

Everything is sorted said John on entering the room

With his eldest brother. Pat scurried into the scullery

And busied with jam, cheese constructing sandwiches.

John removed his coat and threw it over the chair

What's wrong with your mother? he asked. Peter just

Raised his shoulders and eyebrows in answer to his father.

His father stamped noisily across the bare floor

And entered the kitchen, everything is sorted.

The removals will be here first thing on Tuesday

And you and the kids are booked on a flight.

You'll get there a day before Michael and me.
Will go with the removals.

‘Don’t worry, everything will be ok. ’.

He reached her shoulder and squeezed.

Brushing his hand along her back.

‘I know you are worried about your family

I will make sure you get back to see them

I promise, yeah, I know your empty promises.

‘If Birmingham or Coventry or Kent, only miles

From my family and your car, only worked when

you needed to go somewhere, she said

In a harsh Dublin tone.  She knew it would

It will be a long time before she sees her family again.

‘It will be different in Ireland, you'll see’, said John
And slid out of the kitchen.

COMING OR GOING?

John sat on the armchair smoking a Senior Service cigarette, the smoke wafted contentment into the air, a scene came fuzzy at first, then focused in the almost bare room where a stranger would not be sure if they were coming or going.  He would be back among his own people or the nearest thing he found to his own people.  As he relaxed into the chair he searched his mind for a picture of the past, he was a bastard boy from the bastard town or so he called it, he saw himself a young lad leaving the bastard town standing on a platform waiting for a train to take him to England where no one knew of him and he didn’t hear the word bastard on everyones lips, he was young then and immature it will be different he thought with a wife and family.  He mellowed with the aid of the cigarette, a memory of his bastard past came to mind, his creased, worn look contorted into a frown and his dark, lonely past that he couldn’t escape reeled like the teeth of a blunt saw through his mind.

For reasons that are unclear but un-
understandable considering the time 
and place in a land filled with 
religious doctrine.
John was an illegitimate child left 
to be brought up by Aunt Sarah 
That’s all that was known 
and all we would ever know
They were deep, secretive people.  

He recalled the cruel cries from boys at school
‘Johnny has left his ma and da and doesn’t know where 
to find them. Leave the bastard alone, and he will go home 
wagging his tail behind him. ’ A bunch of scruffy hard hard-looking boys marched around him.  He sat by a stagnant pond on waste ground.
 The boys threw rocks into the stagnant pond and splashed him in the oil-like substance that reeked. Bicycle wheels and old frames emerged from the water like the devil's unwanted playthings.  An old, mangled clothes mangle stood upright on the bank like a statue or memorial, and the rear end of an old cart emerged from the centre, rusting and rotting.

The boys formed a line and marched right up to his face like a regimental troop chanting like a choir of cruelty and hate, by the left, by the left, Johnny has no Ma or Da, by the right, by the right, they fucked off on Saturday night.  They laughed a sick, evil laugh and ran off, echoing the word bastard across waste ground. John shook from his thoughts of the past and began wrapping ornaments into a half-filled t-chest that stood in the centre of the room.  A penny for your thoughts said Pat, and all the children laughed at
John is coming back to reality.
He laughed also, but deep 
Dow helt rotten.

BEYOND BANSHEE

What a rush of relief was felt

As the aircraft taxied the run-

Way, and we were in a taxi

Falling through the lush green

Fields of Antrim like a day-

Dream of my mother’s Ireland.

Then we fell into my father’s

Bastard town, through Ligoneil

And the Crumlin road, we turned

Left into another century.  Through

Rows of red brick, cobblestones

Children swinging around the gas

Lamp-posts now converted.

Scruffy boys played football in

The street, a Dickensian view.

Holy Cross School playground

Loomed empty remote within

A spiked gate and a red brick

The wall is topped off with three rows

of rusted barbed wire beyond 

the outside loo, the steel bath

hanging.

 THE PAD

I was a blow-in

at the local flax mill, where she lost

three fingers and all her pride.  Sarah was a drab woman who scrubbed her doorstep every day as if awaiting a man of a miracle to enter her two-up-down home.  In 7' just before

‘the pad’, as my dad

Called, it was besieged

by violence.

He never knew his parent.s 
Sarah, who was a mill worker,  when she wasn't home, she was at the holy cross church praying to the miracle man that never came.

The people of Ardoyne became my friends and family, I live in County Armagh now butI still call Ardoyne home, It was like living in one big home, I could go anywhere in the district and I felt so safe and secure, everyone knew me as their son, to this day I have never met a tighter community of people.  When I first went there, it was like 

stepping back into another time.


I HAVE NO MEMORY OF ALL THIS, BUT HERE IS A PHOTO/POE-ART TRY BUT UNEMOTIONAL

ENGINEERING APHANTRAU

a verbal memory, I only remember

but because like a muscle memory

No images came to mind.
TO SAY THAT I WAS THERE!