The ridiculous decision by the Parades Commission yesterday spurred me on. It is difficult to understand how after nearly thirty years this option was even countenanced.
I did just throw this together this morning and I will likely come back to it for a bit of finessing but here it is.
I didn’t manage to get anything finished even by the stage of a first draft this week. There are a few starts and stanzas but nothing completed. Might have something before the weekends out although that is unlikely as it is Belfast Improv Festival this weekend and that’s Friday through to Sunday in Laverys and Monday night in the Black Box.
I only show about 0.001% of what I write. There’s an awful lot of doggerel inked on to a multitude of notebooks and napkins. Much of it dreadful, some of it would absolutely get me cancelled. I write on nonetheless. It’s a good practise, I think, to stream-of-consciousness dump onto a page. There are occasional diamonds in the dirt that can be used. Most of it is catharsis. Like a warm-up before an Improv Show to remove self-consciousness about looking silly. Looking silly is part of the point. Besides, I’m really very good at it.
I did come up with a few lines which may or may not make it into a poem at a later date.
Self-fulfilling pity party.
My face is so much more honest than I
It’s not worth my while to tell you a lie.
I care that people know that I don’t care.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll get something finished soon.
Do you ever dream of standing up from your office desk and just fucking off somewhere? Anywhere? Just to get away from all of it. To free yourself from the worries and concerns that you didn’t choose but were lumbered with. I do. Really a lot. Just get a VW Camper van and head off somewhere with trees and lakes.
I had a bit of a mental health wobble over the weekend in which I felt useless and unworthy. Thankfully this is old ground and over the years I have developed a few techniques to get myself past it. Techniques that don’t involve blocking it out by drinking myself silly or just ignoring it. These things will not be ignored so it’s best to address them as and when they come up or at least as soon as the spoons become available. Poetry is one of those devices. I try to tell myself my trauma in iambic pentameter or rhyme it out or somesuch. Certainly trying to re-structure how I phrase my feelings gifts me with a different angle to look at them from and can provide different paths I can take.
It’s every bit as important to read poetry as it is to read *about* poetry.
Death of a Naturalist tuned 60 on the first of January this year (2026).
I was introduced to this book in 1990 as part of my G.C.S.E in English Literature. The English teacher at this school (St. Columbas in Portaferry. I had recently parted company with The Red High because of Musical differences and I will not be taking questions on that matter) had promised anyone taking on English Lit that there would be no Shakespeare. Baffling. If you don’t like Shakespeare should you be doing English lit? Anyway, we did Sean O’Casey “Juno and the Paycock”, Jennifer Johnstone “How many miles to Babylon” and Seamus Heaney “Death of a Naturalist” all excellent and easily a match for The Bard but still. He’s The Bard.
I probably didn’t appreciate this as much as I could have at the time. I was 14 and had just been expelled from a Grammar school. I was pretty cynical about the whole education system because I felt entirely let down by it and as such had no interest in engaging with it. Privately I did fall in love with this volume.
I have a particular fondness for proletariat poetry, poetry written and spoken in a working class accent about working class things within a working class idiom. This is probably because of the huge chip I have on my shoulder about class. I’m working on it. Even more particularly in a colloquial accent or even my accent. With Heaney all of my senses are engaged and I recognise some of the places he speaks about. I can relate to “Personal Helicon” more so than I can with “The Divine Comedy” (I still love them both).
The 1947 Education act opened the doors to further and higher education in The North of Ireland and boy did it. suddenly working class Catholics and Nationalists had access to university. Out of this came the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and figures like John Hume, Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin were upsetting the status quo and more importantly, were informed in a way they had never been before. These people and the associations they made are precisely why subsequent governments have bent over backwards to price working class people out of education. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” Audre Lorde’
Now *THIS* is a love poem.
Twice Shy
Her scarf a la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath, Sky a tense diaphragm: Dusk hung like a backcloth That shook where a swan swam, Tremulous as a hawk Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need Collapsed each hunting heart But tremulously we held As hawk and prey apart, Preserved classic decorum, Deployed our talk with art.
Our Juvenilia Had taught us both to wait, Not to publish feeling And regret it all too late – Mushroom loves already Had puffed and burst in hate.
So, chary and excited, As a thrush linked on a hawk, We thrilled to the March twilight With nervous childish talk: Still waters running deep Along the embankment walk.
