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Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Who?

If I were to die from loneliness
Who would carry my coffin?
Would my funeral be a procession of
Ghosts and haunting memories?
♞♜♝
Would I be abandoned in the
Road for cars to swerve around and
Curse at the inconvenience and never
Wonder who might lie inside the box?
♞♜♝
Would my flowers be concrete posts
Sewn together by steel wire running
In formation like stern faced guards
To honour my passing?
♞♜♝
And would above my head be placed
A stone with no words inscribed
People would stop and think
I wonder who’s buried there?

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Who?

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

A Cornetto In Prison

I was given a Cornetto today,
I looked at it and wondered.
A passing friend asked
What’s wrong?
I replied, if this was your Cornetto
How would you eat it?
He looked at me and wondered,
Don’t know, he sighed
And walked on.
I looked at it again and wondered.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

A Cornetto In Prison

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Corners
Sharp concrete corners probe the subconscious,
Subjecting the mind to a dull grey,
Everything running in straight lines that stop,
Jut out, and attack any eye that dares to
Seek out curvaceous figures.
♞♜♝
Square bodies in a rectangular box
Pace to the end of space
Then turn to face another point
That pokes out like a finger of accusation.
We are condemned to walk around the outside of life.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Corners

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Prison Walls

I wear these walls like an over-coat
Heavy and grey they hang on me
Forcing me down in darkness
Where only silver buttons shine
Each one given to me by a passing friend.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Prison Walls

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Time

Time cuts him
Like a blade drawn across his throat
Frustration flows swiftly out.
♞♜♝
Relaxes him into settled sleep
Alone and gaunt,
Beside me seeps the richness of his life.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Time

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Drink

Whiskey stole the child.
We watched the demolition of security.
We learned that vodka tears don’t smell.
♞♜♝
They smart on welts like salt and
Burn deceiving eyes.
♞♜♝
Enchanting self-esteem to shipwreck on the
Rocks that swirl inside a Black Russian,
Drowning innocence.
♞♜♝
Adults now, we struggle out of an empty bottle,
Exhausted, trying to find a hearth to rest at.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Drink

Christopher Owens ðŸ”– Relationships.

The source of so much joy and despair, it seems that the last decade has stretched the concept to breaking point where men and women simply do not trust one another as they have been conditioned to view everyone as either a potential rapist or a potential gold digger.

But what about the angle where two people are bad for each other? A car crash played out at parties, 3am shouting matches in the street and passive aggressive Tik Toks.

A pain in the arse for everyone around them but, for the writer, ripe source material.

Recently shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2023 and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2024, HLR’s second book of poetry (following the brilliant History of Present Complaint) is another triumph. Looking at the rise and fall of Dolly and Man, it becomes apparent why they didn’t work out with the passage of each page as we get nosebleeds, dining and dashing, depression, self-harm and alcohol.

But even in the most filth ridden moments, Dolly is able to recognise that there is something between the two of them, even if she doesn’t want to acknowledge it or puts it in the starkest terms possible.

Take this segment from ‘Cereal for Dinner’ as an example:

We slept for days, weeks, through the coldest

months, seeing nobody, going nowhere, doing nothing

but sleeping, only occasionally waking to fuck & piss & smoke,

hazy in our fugue state, eyes glazed, hair stale with sweat & breath.

Then we’d take more pills, drink more booze, pass out cold again.

All that time spent refusing to live and refusing to die.

This self-inflicted coma was the closest I’d ever felt

to you peace. I dreamt of nothing.

Notice how the entanglement and comfort of love and lust are depicted here in functionary terms, such as how sex (pre and post coital) is paired with toilet breaks? And how such acts which are supposed to make one feel they are “living in the moment” are illustrated with refusal and with the extremes of life and death? This is not a stable coupling but, in the short term, the passion clearly overrides stability.

These contradictions carry on throughout the book and not only demonstrate HLR’s eye for the mundane but also how she is able to give added depth to her characters by having them show us their emotions without telling the reader.

Tender but bleak, dirty but glamorous, rebellious but traditional, Ex-Cetera is the quintessential doomed modern romance.

HLR, 2023, Ex-Cetera. Nine Pens Press, ISBN-13: 979-1739151751

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

Ex-Cetera

People And Nature ☭ A guest post by John Graham Davies.

22-November-2023

Until the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, Pablo Neruda had been celebrated as the great modern Spanish love poet. The war changed that. It drew Neruda into the centre of politics.

Neruda’s great poem, I’m Explaining a Few Things, like Pablo Picasso’s painting, was created in response to the bombing of civilians by Hitler and Mussolini’s airforces at Guernica in 1937.

This atrocity resulted in the death of over 1000 civilians. As of today, November 11th, 2023, more than ten times that number have been buried in the rubble of Gaza.
Guernica, by Pablo Picasso

If Neruda were alive today, maybe his poem would have gone something like this.

The cultural critics are going to say:
Poet, can’t you give the politics a rest?
Where are the lilacs, oh poet?
And the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
And the rain,
Spattering its words full of birds and flowers?
♞♜♝
Oh, have no fear, I’ll tell you all about flowers.
♞♜♝
My grandmother, my Tata, loved geraniums;
her scarlet Haifa garden, left behind in ’48.
Flowers followed her, driven from camp to camp,
like the Wandering Jew of old: Tripoli, Shatila, Askar.
And then, Gaza.
Here, trapped between the barbed wire and the sea.
♞♜♝
So now her great grandchildren chirrup round the broken streets of El Baheer,
On the edge of Khan Younis, with its mosques and clocks and uncollected rubbish.
And we make the life we can.
Our life.
Sometimes with electricity, more often not.
And every five years we look to the skies.
♞♜♝
From El Baheer you can gaze north
over Palestine’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
Then south through green citrus groves, to Al Mawasi.
♞♜♝
Our house!
Karim called it the house of flowers,
because in every cranny crimson geraniums burst,
like the blood of the living.
A noble-looking home,
with its dogs and children.
And we lived, always with one eye on the sky.
♞♜♝
Around us, everything loud with big voices.
The salt of merchandise:
in the better moments
Fatima’s oil flowing into ladles,
Figs and almonds from Al Zahra,
and the deep murmur
of feet and hands and cries, swelling in the streets.
Metres, litres, the sharp
market measure of life.
Stacked-up fish, ivory potatoes, bottled water.
And wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down to the sea.
♞♜♝
And then, one morning, the sky shrieked,
fire leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings –
and from then on the scream of explosions,
and from then on grey rubble and blood.
Pious men with jets,
Kevlar wearing bandits with shapely teeth,
Heroes who holiday each year in Disney Florida,
Butchers with fake rabbis spewing blessings
came through the sky to kill children.
And the blood of children ran through the streets,
without fuss, like children’s blood.
♞♜♝
Jackals, that the jackals would despise!
Stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out!
Vipers that the vipers would abominate!
♞♜♝
Face to face with them, I have seen the red blood
of Palestine tower like a tide
to drown them in one wave!
♞♜♝
Crazed colonisers:
See my dead house!
Look at broken Gaza:
from every house, instead of flowers,
the heads of grey children grow from the rubble.
And in every mind
Gaza’s name crystallises.
And from every crime bullets are born,
to one day pierce their dessicated hearts.
♞♜♝
And the critics ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great olive groves of his native land?
♞♜♝
Don’t you see the blood in the streets!
Don’t you see the blood in the streets!!
Don’t you see the blood in the streets!!!


Pablo Neruda, after an original translation by Nathaniel Tarn, freely adapted by John Graham Davies

 The original poem by Pablo Neruda is here

Bomb damage in Gaza, November 2023

⏩ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

I’m Explaining A Few Things About Palestine – After Pablo Neruda

Carrie Twomey ðŸ’•on looking into her front garden. 

Burst Away In Flight

Listening to the starlings gather, their chatter

was increasingly boisterous, like children

released at recess bouncing into the rhythm of play.

I looked out the window, wondering where they were

conducting their cacophony, when

with an astonishing sonic boom

- the sky fell down -

the frenetic flock burst away in flight.

⏩Carrie Twomey hates Illinois Nazis (just like the Blues Brothers)

Burst Away In Flight

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Pensive

Inside a box tied with wire
Our hands touched: crowds
Gasped as time ran out
On lips wet from captive kisses.
♞♜♝
Gordian knots untighten when
Your gentle fingers tug at their ends
Frayed from wear. Your hands
Pulled hard, melted my trust.
♞♜♝
A soft light blinks on a barbed horizon,
Only the sun set deep in our eyes.
Obstacles impair our vision of a future
When hope is our sunlight.
♞♜♝
Regrets are smiles wasted: pain is more
Than love, in a room, of an evening.
Gently put your hand inside the
Box, cut the wire gripping me.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Pensive

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Treadmill

Birds visit in the mornings
Picking up scraps discarded
By prison monks.
♞♜♝
Each in a cave meditating.
Women visit in the evenings
Picking up scraps regurgitated
♞♜♝
By bull dogs enemies’ a creation of
Arrogances dangle on batons
Wielded on the back of a generation
Who didn’t turn and run.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Treadmill

Christopher Owens ✍ with a poem.


Nachtraeglichkeit

Snakes and rabbits perched on the rooftop

while a well pecked hatchling lies on the

staircase. Its breast ripped open and the

beak jammed open. There is a silence

in the courtyard that becomes more

noticeable the longer one looks at the beak.

♜ ♞ ♟

Along Queens Road, still potent feelings

of eroticism, exhilaration and comfort are

evident in my nervous system. Retracing my

steps, I am reminded that I would never

beg for affection. A decision that many would

struggle with in this age of presentism.

♜ ♞ ♟

The ruined library has seen better days.

Wet rot has rendered the shelves unstable,

with them contorting into various shapes.

By contrast, the books are in remarkable

shape. Some have even retained a fresh

smell in spite of the cobwebs.

♜ ♞ ♟

Near the coast, an endless array of tents made out

of flags fester along the hard shoulder, consisting of

remnants from the Greater War. Some merely stare at

their flags, while others try to articulate a sense of victory.

Smallpox is rampant throughout these little containments.

Their screams an endless gulder that bears little resemblance

to the piercing scream so ubiquitous throughout the culture.

♜ ♞ ♟

An endless wave of eyeless corpses flow

under the Albert Bridge. Any expressions

have been modified beforehand thanks to

surgery and the inevitability of history.

The flow is steady, and quite soothing

for the call centre jockey on lunch break.

♜ ♞ ♟

Most acts of remembering are interpretative,

driven by the needs of the present. A constant

battle of wits between your reactions and the

mechanics of a machine. The steering wheel the

difference between euphoria and collapse. Hence

the addition of barbed wire on the grill.

♜ ♞ ♟

The graveyard of statues festers in between the

blossoming primary school architecture and the

resilient (but tired) fun fair. Both linked with a

slogan magnified due to gauche LED signage:

“Boundaries are bridges, not fences”.

Meanwhile, the statues face the elements

with cracked paint and stumps coated in

the most exuberant, fertile moss.

📜Christopher Owens, 2023. A Vortex Of Securocrats. ASIN: B0BW2XKJS3

Nachtraeglichkeit

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Mirror

I don’t know you
Why do you stare?
Your eyes, they’re empty.
♞♜♝
Ah yes I know you now
- SMASH -
Fuck it, I can’t bring myself
To look at you.
Don’t dare condemn me
I wasn’t there, when you
Killed me.
♞♜♝
My head, it’s too heavy for
This, I am only a child
Please hold my reflection; it’s escaping.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Mirror

Christopher Owens ✍ with a poem.


Proximity

The New Year wind was sharp. Throughout
the Laganside, there was an enforced silence.
The solitary figure searched in the night for
a resolution and found it in the form of the Lagan.
♜ ♞ ♟
Problems abound that evening, he saw a broken
gargoyle sitting on the footbridge. Its face missing
a nose and featuring a hole where the right cheek
should be. The silence was no longer peaceful.
♜ ♞ ♟
An armistice or unconditional surrender.
♜ ♞ ♟
Translucent jellyfish and leafy sea dragons
caught his eye due to the exuberant colours
and the constant motion of the waves, creating
the kind of psychedelic trance that rivals peyote.
♜ ♞ ♟
Diving in, he saw himself heading towards the
SS Chirripo. The second his skin felt the water,
his life dissipated, the endorphins surged
through his back and reinforced his purpose.
♜ ♞ ♟
Reaching the wreck, he put his hands through
the thick kelp and orange cup coral, marvelling
at how radiant their colours were but did not see
the crabs as they consumed his face and lungs.
♜ ♞ ♟
The ocean is noisy, so no one heard the banging.
However, back on the footpath, the gargoyle
considered the silence to be potent with ambiguity,
making the New Year wind all the more cutting.

📜Christopher Owens, 2023. A Vortex Of Securocrats. ASIN: B0BW2XKJS3

Proximity

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Reflection

Beneath a heavy patched quilt
Lay the body of a child, lifeless
As I lifted it the soul of morality ran
Dripped over the edge of my fingers
Turned into anger; smashed off a cold floor.
♞♜♝
Inside out it turned, stood up, walked
Into an unforgiving breeze that left a
Face without a smile,
Whose reflection couldn’t hold lips
Away from the sharp edge of shattered glass.
♞♜♝
Crows picked out the eyes of innocence,
Jabbed pointed beaks into blueness turning
Black like the caped, white-necked bastard
It widened into a gaping hole where contorted
Corpse became a person; without Emotion?

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Reflection

Frankie Quinn with a poem from his book Open Gates.

Jackie

Who am I? she asks.
Beauty, so shocking they file past
To stare.
Unaware she smiles never
Once believing that it is her
Their eyes scan.
♞♜♝
Maternal instinct confuses;
Her womanhood on fire now.
I must remain
The cornerstone of a family
At war, she too a soldier.

⏩ Frankie Quinn is a former republican prisoner who is now a community activist. He is the author of Open Gates, a book of poetry.   

Jackie

Tommy McKearney ✍ shares his thoughts on the work of a fellow blanketman. 


Former H-Block blanket-man, Malachy ‘Muffles’ Trainor, has recently published another book of his poetry. Under the title His collection of poetry, the Armagh City native has written 67 poems for this engaging work. 

The quiet and unassuming poet was incarcerated in Long Kesh for seven difficult years from 1976 until1983. During that time he endured the hardships experienced by protesting Republican prisoners and was witness to the harrowing and tragic events surrounding the hunger strikes. While never stridently so and indeed almost to the point of being obscure at times, his poetry resonates with a strong message from his life experience.

Although Malachy was released four decades ago, prison and related aspects occur in several poems throughout this book. Among many references to that time in his life, the most poignant is perhaps found in, ‘On Bread Vanished’:

Oh watch the speeds eye

That hunger dwelling lit

Yes a smile, a comrade dies

I saw the green trees oh

In all, Malachy refers specifically to prisons or prisoners in so many of his poems. Surprisingly though for someone who personally suffered the cruelties inflicted by a brutal jail regime, there is no evidence of anger much less hatred through his verses. There is instead a measure of sensitive reflection that is if anything, a more powerful commentary on that grim era.

It would, however, be a mistake to see the collection as focused on only one aspect of the poet’s life. In this fascinating publication, Malachy reflects across a number of topics ranging from global to local as he comments on nature itself and the nature of society.

In ‘Why so then’ we hear the voice of his native Country Armagh:

September blue so yes fuse

Blissful days enter the fray

Favour hard drenched afar

Ripe apples, leaves, a fall

Elsewhere there is an understated yet sharp awareness of another aspect of his home county:

Planted settlers and flags

Stumble fall here the call

And privilege big bang

Horse and saddle so ride

Conquered yes and long ago

To think you might be wrong

Overall this is a fine contribution to Irish literature complimented with an elegant and insightful introduction by Siobhan Hughes.

This is a collection that deserves a wide readership.

Malachy Trainor, 2023, His Collection Of Poetry. Self-Published.  ISBN-13: 979-8394828775

Tommy McKearney is a left wing and trade union activist. 
Follow on Twitter @Tommymckearney 

His Collection Of Poetry

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