CHARLIE'S DEAD!

 Emily Dickinson says that in poetry you tell the truth but tell it slant. Poetry might also be regarded as a kind of code that uses similes and metaphors to express something about life that can't be easily captured; something that has to do with intuition rather than reason.

For some reason I've just remembered a code which the girls in my hometown used, to convey that one of them was showing their slip below the dress: Charlie's dead.

This case of the slip showing below the hem of the dress was regarded as indelicate to speak of in those days (1950's Ireland) hence there had to be a code for it. 

The Iranian activist Mahvash Sabet was accused by a judge of saying one thing and meaning another, which was  what the girls of my home town were doing, but the consequence for Mahvash Sabat was that she was given a hefty jail sentence rather than experiencing a moment of slight embarrassment and adjustment.

Poems That Mean Something Else

I wrote a poem once about seagulls.

Well, it wasn’t really about seagulls.

I was in love with the next-door ballet student

and having sweated for weeks, I plucked up courage

to ask her out and brought her to the cinema

where we watched a film called Mise Éire.

It wasn’t long before the seagulls came in view,

scudding the waves and rising into a gale,

the sound track’s orchestra rising with them,

and I loudly whispered ‘Symbols of Freedom!’

to my wafer-thin companion.

Back home, I wrote about those freedom-seagulls.

I meant to show the piece to my lissom dancer,

but time overtook resolution. Later,

the poem was published in some small magazine.

Still making poems, I haven’t yet been charged

with writing one thing and meaning something else,

as Mahvash Sabet was by the Iranian judge

who sentenced her to twenty years in prison.

Note: Mise Éire = 'I am Ireland' the title of a documentary film about the Easter Week Rebellion of 1916.

From Angel Hour  Ciaran O'Driscoll 2021