A 'FOUND POEM' ABOUT A CITY BUS TOUR

 

CITY BUS TOUR

Our city is a tort, with the cherry

in the middle. And this is Schwartzenberg

on his horse after the battle of Leipzig,

and you can see he was victorious.

And here is a street that was built to bring

beer to the poorer kind, not to disturb 

the elegant people in the centre circle.

There was no food in the old coffee houses –

they didn’t want to have the smell of onions.

And this is the Town Hall – in German called

the Rathaus, with the Christmas Tree in front,

which is not ready yet. A different window

is opened every day to bring the gifts.

And here is the Ministry of War, now called

the Ministry of Defence, but in those days

they called it what it was. The city has

four railway stations, but for fifty years

it had no trains that travelled to the East.

And there you see the Church of St Charles,

patron of Black Death and various plagues.

Here is the Natural History Museum,

it is ranked among the first ten of the world.

Everything is in it, like pockets of boys.

This is the New River. The Old River

is now a lake. The artists used to live

over there, but they had much scandal,

and so they were not given galleries.

And this is Metternich, who told Franz Joseph

‘You don’t discuss with the people, you thump them.’

Later, we go to Concert Hall for Strauss.

Watching the shops is also interesting

but in the fog you can’t do anything.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020

ITALIAN POETRY FESTIVAL RIFLESSI DIVERSI POSTPONED UNTIL 2021

The long-running Umbrian poetry festival, Riflessi DiVersi, which occurs around the end of September, has had to be postponed this year until 2021 on account of the Coronavirus. That is to say, the intended participants for 2020 will be the participants, hopefully, in the 2021 edition of Riflessi DiVersi.

    In the meantime, a website has been created, "Irlanda in Umbria", which features the work of the postponed poets, as well as the musicians, together with items from past incarnations of the festival. 

    Click on the link below the picture to view the website

L to R: Aurelio Stoppini, Vera Lucia di Oliveira, Ciaran O'Driscoll, Margarita....., Rita Castigli, Andreina Panico; Riflessi DiVersi 2015.

http://irlandainumbria.ie/

SPLEENWORT PLANTS AND LICHEN ON THE OLD WALL

 

A fresh growth of Spleenwort spotted on the ancient wall between our garden and the school grounds of Scoil Máthair Dé, Limerick.

Do you like lichen? Or does it rouse your spleen?

The Spleenwort plant reminds me of winter because its fronds remain green throughout the year and I first noticed them in winter.

NOVEMBER DAYS

Parsley pales. The cat craps in the flower box.
Round the garden table, garden chairs still range,
an icebound working group on climate change.
The car door’s frozen doorhandle unlocks

when blessed by water. Christmas rules TV.
Although no visitor’s appeared in weeks,
the feeble latch-grip slips, the front gate creaks
its winter wolf-crying expectancy.

Our neighbour takes his DIY indoors,
no longer deafens us with power tools.
Spleenwort fronds survive on old stone walls,
each finger-lobe a blister-strip of spores.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020

SURVISION MAGAZINE #7

SurVision Magazine #7 is now online for your reading pleasure.

Edited by the redoubtable Anatoly Kudryavitsky, this midsummer issue has a remarkable translation of a poem by Giorgio de Chirico, the painter/writer and Surrealist Precursor. The poem is 'Speranza' and the translation is by Anatoly himself.

There is a generous sprinkling of Irish poets among the International gathering of original poems and translations. SurVision Magazine #7 may be accessed at survisionmagazine.com 'current issue'.

Oh, I forgot to say, I have three poems in it myself. How self-effacing of me!

ON THE SPANISH STEPS, ROME (January 2013)

A MAN THE WORLD PASSED BY

He was sitting in the middle of the Spanish Steps 
bent slightly forward, looking straight ahead. 
Staring in the face of the Void, letting the world know. 
In the ninth of the nine circles of Nothingness, 
making a silent statement. In the rain.

Grey-haired, grey-bearded, perhaps in his early fifties. 
The hood of his jacket not pulled over his head. 
Rain splattering gently on the Spanish Steps
and on his hair. Two members of the Polizia Roma 
a little higher up the stairway, watching him. 

Like one of those performers who mimic statues 
(except for his lack of make-up), suddenly 
he comes to life: an arm reaches out, 
two fingers raised in bored impatience
towards a young love-lingering couple nearby. 

In response to the gesture, which might be read

as disrespectful or begging a cigarette
or disrespectfully begging a cigarette,
the young man, reading kindly, offers one.
The spent poseur fishes a lighter from his pocket.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020 

A DROP OF WELCOME RAIN

SOMETIMES RAIN COMES LIKE THIS

Sometimes rain comes like this

a gentle shower that’s hard to beat

for calling things to order

It calls my heart to order

I listen and am moved

No argument more powerful

it calms me to compliance

more willingly than downpours,

comes unannounced and soothing

The riddle of its falling 

makes mystery easier  

I see what should have been

a stand-out all along

It touches everything and so

I’m touched by everything

An all-embracing murmur

an omnipresence tapping

on my inmost being’s door

it throws a veil of comfort

over the garden and the trees

darkens the sandstone paths

postponing work and weeding

and without a word being said

calls amnesty and rest

Sometimes rain comes like this.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020

THE HOSPITAL AND COVID 19

Poems have been written about Covid 19 and poems have been written about the experience of a hospital stay, but has any poem been written yet about a hospital stay occasioned because of contracting Covid 19?
      I have written poems about my stays in hospital and finally, last Saturday, wrote a sixteen-liner called 'What the Angels Say' which is really about my experience of Covid 19 so far, a case of undergoing a fairly uneventful isolation.
      I have had two hospital stays in the past six years and I am considered 'high risk' for Covid 19, because of which I  continue to isolate to a good extent. But I am almost as afraid of going back to hospital as I am afraid of Covid 19.
      My admissions to hospital over the past six years were to a public hospital not far from where I live, which has recently earned the title of the worst in the country for overcrowding. In 2014, I was admitted there on account of complications arising from a triple bypass performed less than a week before, in a hospital in Dublin. The second admission to the hospital in question was shortly after a hip replacement, when I was diagnosed with Sepsis and spent the month of August 2017 receiving intravenous antibiotics four times a day (morning, noon, evening, night).
      I wrote a sonnet (as part of a longer sequence) about those two hospital experiences. It was sub-titled "with apologies to Patrick Kavanagh" because it references the latter's beautiful sonnet about recovering in hospital from lung cancer. It differs from the usual sonnet in that it was written (like Kavanagh's) in hexameters instead of pentameters. Also, my rhyming scheme is somewhat less regular than Kavanagh's.
      Kavanagh was more thankful than I was for his experience, even while he was in hospital; for the new lease of life he was given, leading to an artistic awakening. Today, I have become grateful for my new lease of life, but the thought of having to return to that hospital again fills me with dread.

THE HOSPITAL

(with apologies to Patrick Kavanagh)

A year ago I failed to love a dysfunctional 

ward in a public hospital: nurses overwrought, 

each task cut short by one more urgent, low morale,

not counting how the chap in the next bed roared all night

in vain for his wife and son, and every now and then

the overwhelming odour of incontinence. 

The main gate tempting me to a quick cigarette

when I had to be content in the smoke-free suntrap

beside the entrance door, the Sister’s allegations

that I falsely occupied an acute bed, the crammed  

and ever-changing maladies! This is not claptrap –

there’s far too much of it about, disguised as sense

in the mouths of government ministers who have named

my sorry hospital a ‘Centre of Excellence’.

      

In hospital (note tag on right arm) on the way to recovery, with my wife Margaret and unseen visitors, during Cuisle International Poetry Festival 2014

      

      I think that in Kavanagh's time, hospitals were scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, there wasn't the same danger of contracting a new disease during your stay. They had a more antiseptic feel to them.

      The conditions in my hospital were, as you may have gathered from my sonnet, not very satisfactory. The thought of having to go back there concentrates my mind, and makes me determined to wash my hands several times a day, avoid rubbing my nose, mouth and eyes. I touch coins only with a paper napkin in my hand, and perform a number of other practices, which may be uselful against Covid 19 or not. 
      It's amazing how itchy my eyes and nose have become since we were told to avoid contact with the face. Perhaps these organs were just as itchy before, but in those days touching them wasn't a matter of life or death!

©Ciaran O'Driscoll 2020