tambourine

[dedalus]

Arrows pierced the hut when I was seven,
and my father, transfixed, fell down on the hob;
some big chap with an axe finished off the job
while me Ma was screaming and I was silently

cheering them on, wide-eyed, frightened,
peering up from under the table.
Bad cess to me Daddy, thank God he's gone!

But me Ma, I couldn't believe it, she was in floods of tears.
How could she mourn him after all those years?
Ochone, he was my heart and soul and moon and sun!

I'll never understand women.

The French Sassenachs came when I was fifteen
and I was given an old spear, shoved into the line;
hang about in the middle, lad, ye'll be fine!

But they hit us in the middle and front and sides.
Bleedin disaster.

Dear God, these people had horses
the size of bloody giraffes,
and they were better dressed, too, than we were;
they sliced us up and killed us in hundreds.

I went to ground in the woods of Wicklow,
and met a sweet girl, her name was Marie.
She said, young man, I cannot sleep with thee
until this ancient land of ours is free!

Female patriots, a scourge, she was my first.
Later I was to meet plump Molly Ivors.

I slippy-slided back to Dubbalin:
sure where else could I hope to go?
Malaga
Taormina
Benidorm
Hydra
Phuket
Penang?

Well, you couldn't go local in Kyoto:
just one little photo
says it all.

Shalangalang. Smack.

That was then.
This is now.

I have the vision.
I have lived hundreds of years.
It's what I do. No, really.

There is a notch in the hills,
just there, please look at the horizon
as the sun goes sinking down.

This is why I love Africa.

Egypt, on the other hand, reeks; it does;
it has the smell of the Pharaohs,
the stink of their whips and chains,

their stone pyramids,
their Nazi mentality.

I could get along the Greeks
for no good reason.
They'd talk and talk forever

then smash 200 plates
to pre-bouzouki music.
God, how we enjoyed that!

There is nothing better
than to sling around plates
when love turns sour in the baking sun.

Inspector Robinson, CID,
made an arrest
on Mykonos.

Jesus, that took balls.
The walls
gather so close around you.

Been there? You know
just what I mean. Deadly.

Israel? I can remember it
back in the good old days,
the decade after Titus.

They came back.
You knew they would.

Now it's fifty-five machine guns
every hundred yards.
Trigger happy maniacs.

Bad fuckin bastards,
with about half of them
in uniform. I tell no lie.

Food's not bad, though.

If you and I could fly
across the deep and wine-dark sea,
there could be hope and love and mystery

in the cradle of our history.

We could look to the rising of the sun,
but some idiot always has a gun.
Come little lad, come home, be free.

They push kids like you and me to take it:
but grow to a man you can shove and shake it

like a tambourine; I've seen
that so many, so many times.

And not a thing you do
(I loved that girl)
not a single solitary thing
(I loved her from the start)
will make the slightest
bit of difference.

[ray miller]

What is bad cess? If this is an attempt to portray an Irish diaspora then it succeeds pretty well. Still, I enjoy your poems more when the focus is smaller.

[dedalus]

What is bad cess? A curse, bad luck. No, this has nothing to do with any Irish diaspora. They all went the other way, to America and not the Mediterranean. This is an impressionistic (blurry, unfocussed) look at European values and the roots of our civilisation which somehow manages to leave out the Romans, Christianity, most of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the rise of the nation-state, the age of exploration, the birth of science and both the First and Second World Wars. -- Cheers, Brendan

[David]

It could perfectly well end at Molly Ivors for me. From there on it seems to accelerate from the local (great stuff) to the universal, and I liked the local stuff better. On this occasion, at least.

Lots of good stuff throughout, though, as ever.

Cheers

David

[Cooper]

West Briton!

[dedalus]

I say! What exactly, of course, I can't be sure.