A POEM (AND PICTURE) FOR WORLD POETRY DAY

HOPE

If it hadn't been there from the start... But it was,

and this is what it means to you: morning,

no matter, without reason, above all.

Morning no matter, if it hadn't

been there without reason above all,

you huddled in an overcoat and gone.

Against the rain, against the wind, with this,

no matter you huddled in an overcoat

and doing the morning without reason.

Rain raking the trees, tattooing the windows,

the changing of the light, the distances

of sky and shore, this irresistible.

If it hadn't been there above all from the start,

no matter the changing of the light,

you with an overcoat covered and gone.

But it was yours and this is what it means:

morning, and doing these rainy distances

of sky and shore, you irresistible.

From Life Monitor © Ciaran O'Driscoll (2009)

POSTWOMAN

POSTWOMAN

Postwoman, ply your metier

from door to door and street to street

in balmy sun or when it’s wetter

in rain and fog and slushy sleet.

And leave your bicycle to stand

outside a local pub or grocer’s

except where things are out of hand

and thieves ignored by law-enforcers,

then you must wheel it as you pop 

from letterbox to letterbox

resting it everywhere you stop, 

which slows you down like when you knock

at homes that lack postal access,

or when you deliver bulky parcels.

Once, as you chatted at a house,

I saw your cycle seized by rascals

complete with mailbag. Luckily

the theft turned out to be a prank

by youngsters on a cider-spree.

Postwoman far from being a crank,

you tongue-lashed the culprits, then set to

your task again, a pleasant hike

because the man you were talking to

kindly offered to mind the bike.

Whether bliss, indifference or woe

the tidings in your missives meet,

postwoman, ply your valued chore

from house to house, from street to street.

In a uniform labelled Post

that’s slate-blue and whose badge is green,

in summer plod through heat and dust,

through ice and snow in winter’s spleen.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2014

FLOOD-POEM

THE DELUGE

What happened to sympathy and compassion?

We don’t even ask these days, it wouldn’t be

too bad if we did. One after another

calamities, and then disasters, come

numbing us, while charity bosses line

their nests. This afternoon I watched a bird

for half an hour – or was it this morning?

I forget what struck me about the bird,

its compact size, feathered fragility

or aerial prowess? All three, perhaps.

Yesterday the Shannon burst its banks,

and a man from the city council appeared

on the news, staring into the face of doom. 

The highest tide on record, he said. Seven

inches higher than the previous one. 

Noah’s Ark, I thought, that’s what struck me about 

the bird, sent out to look for landfall from 

the Island Field, simultaneously 

a bird and symbol of deliverance.

Today, all of a sudden, climate change

is a fact, no longer open to debate:

politicians have begun to use the phrase.

Seven inches up from the previous high,

said the man from the city council on TV,

gaping at the future. Lucky so far,

I live on high ground, on the other side.

The Island Field: St Mary’s Park, a housing estate in Limerick which was very badly flooded during recent storms.

© Ciaran O’Driscoll 2014

CUISLE, LIMERICK CITY'S ANNUAL POETRY FESTIVAL, IS HERE AGAIN

WED 23 OCTOBER: 

8pm Launching by artist John Shinnors, Flannery's Bar, Catherine St.

9.30 pm Garbiel Fitzmaurice and Open Mic at the White House Bar

THURS 24 OCTOBER: 

1.00 pm Reading by Ron Carey, the Hunt Museum

7pm Launch of The Stony Thursday Book, 69 O'Connell St (formerly the Belltable)

8pm Jo Slade, Marco Viscomi, Adam Wyeth at 69 O'Connell St

FRIDAY 25 OCTOBER:

1.00 pm Reading by Kerrie O'Brien, the Hunt Museum

7pm Ciaran O'Driscoll celebrating 70 years, 69 O'Connell St 

8pm Biddy Jenkinson, David Wheatley at 69 O'Connell St

9.30pm Poetry Films, 69 O'Connell St

SATURDAY 26 OCTOBER: 

1.00pm Tribute to poets no longer with us: Dennis O'Driscoll, Pearse Hutchinson, 

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, 69 O'Connell St

8pm Anthony Cronin, Hugh Maxton, 69 O'Connell St

COME AND JOIN US AT CUISLE!

A POETRY FESTIVAL IN UMBRIA

Riflessi DiVersi (a pun on ‘Reflections in Verse’ and ‘Diverse Reflections’) is an annual poetry festival held in Umbria – specifically, in the provincial capital Perugia and the nearby town of Magione. The festival takes place in early autumn, and is now in its eighth year. The 2013 festival ran from 25th to 28th September inclusive, and included two public readings, visits to two schools and a reading for 200-plus pupils in the Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia. The poets were Pat Boran and myself (Ciaran O’Driscoll) from Ireland, and Maria Rosaria Luzi and Antonio Carlo Ponti from Umbria. The translators were Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Italian to English) and Rita Castigli (English to Italian). Music was provided by the violin-cellist Andrea Rellini. The director of the festival is Fernando Trilli, founder with the late Paul Cahill of its organizing body, Immagini d’Irlanda in Umbria. The reading in Magione on 26th September was honoured by the presence of the new Irish Ambassador to Italy, Mr Bobby McDonagh, who said that his attendance at Riflessi DiVersi was his first ambassadorial visit outside of Rome.

The 2013 festival marks the beginning of a collaboration between Riflessi DiVersi and Cuisle Limerick City International Poetry Festival, a linking which involves, among other things, an exchange of poets on a yearly basis.

As one of the participants this year, I was hugely impressed by the warmth of the atmosphere and the rapport between all participants, making the twinning of Riflessi and Cuisle entirely appropriate, as our Limerick poetry festival has always aimed to be a friendly and unpretentious occasion.

I was particularly impressed by the secondary school students in the Palazzo dei Priori who braved coming up to the podium from among their 200 colleagues to ask questions and express their views on poetry, and also by those who approached each poet individually afterwards to say how happy they were to experience living poets face to face, and how the session had opened their minds to an entirely new dimension. The enthusiasm of these young people who came forward to talk to us after the reading will remain long in my mind. 

A view over Perugia from the top of the Torre del Cassero di Porta Sant'Angelo, where a public reading took place on Friday evening, 27th September.

Irish poet Pat Boran chats with my son Conor before the Friday evening reading.

During my own reading at the Torre del Cassero, Friday evening. To my left is my translator, Rita Castigli.

My thanks to the Ireland Literature Exchange for their financial support.

Photographs by Margaret Farrelly.

BARNACLED ON OSLO

We are just back from a pleasant, interesting if financially challenging week in Oslo, which must surely be Europe's, if not the world's, most expensive city. Our hotel accommodation was a cramped 'studio apartment' hardly much bigger than a single bedroom. There was a hob with two rings, a microwave oven, two cups, two glasses, two spoons. We would have had to pay heavily extra for any additional cutlery, pots, pans, etc, so we did without them. We had brought our own coffee pot and coffee, and I bought a croissant or two at the nearby 7/11 for breakfast. We lived on one proper meal a day, treating ourselves twice to a splurge in a top-class restaurant. For lunch, we filled bread rolls with ham and cheese in the morning and brought them with us on our various excursions, and bought a few bananas. Matters were almost on a military footing.
We bought weekly transport passes at a reasonable price, and they covered buses, trams, the Metro (or T-bane) and the ferries to the inner islands of the Oslo fjord. Visiting these islands on days of good weather was probably the highlight of our stay, though the Munch Museum, the Ibsen Museum and the amazing architecture of the Opera House were close runners-up.
The islands are environmentally protected, there are small sandy or shingly beaches, hardly any shops or cafés (on some islands there are no retail outlets at all). You can easily and quickly walk around most islands and the views of the fjord and the city are quite stunning from several vantage points. The small beaches reminded me of childhood holidays in Schull, West Cork. The islands we visited were Langoyene, Hovedoya, and Gressholmen.
It was on these islands that we encountered the barnacle geese, beautifully shaped and plumaged creatures, herbivores that moved sedately through grass, cow-like in their grazing.

There are restrictions on the sale of liquor in Norway. While you can buy beer in any super- or mini-market, wine and spirits can only be bought in designated stores, which close at 6 pm. (And I thought it was bad when Ireland brought in a law closing off-licences at 10 pm!) 

I eventually saw a wine store in the Oslo train station, and made sure to get there before six o'clock the following day, rather than spend €8.00 per glass for a a few nightcaps of plonk in the hotel bar. Hence the rather exhausted look of triumph on my face in the photograph below. The price for those bottles (of Italian wine) was comparable to prices in Irish off-licences.

THE ROBOTS HAVEN'T GONE AWAY, YOU KNOW

The robots haven't gone away, you know. That's probably why the poetry editor of 3 Quarks Daily posted my poem 'Please Hold' in his Sunday Poem slot quite recently. In fact, 'Please Hold' has been my most published poem of recent times, having first appeared in Southword, a Cork-based magazine, then in The Forward Book of Poetry 2009, then in the Anthology Poems of the Decade 2002 – 2011 (Forward/Faber, 2011). It was uploaded to Youtube from a reading I gave in the White House Limerick, and also from a Reading at Ó Bhéal, Cork. I published it in my collection Life Monitor (2009), from where it has been selected to be translated into Slovenian for a collection just published in Ljubljana. And here it is again, from 3 Quarks Daily. 

'Please Hold' is an apoplectic rant in verse about the 'new-fangled' impersonal telephone system on which you'd be lucky ever to hear a real human voice. Invasion of the robots! 

3 QUARKS DAILY

JUNE 02, 2013

SUNDAY POEM

Please Hold

This is the future, my wife says. 

We are already there, and it’s the same 

as the present. Your future, here, she says. 

And I’m talking to a robot on the phone. 

The robot is giving me countless options, 

none of which answer to my needs. 

Wonderful, says the robot 

when I give him my telephone number. 

And Great, says the robot 

when I give him my account number. 

I have a wonderful telephone number 

and a great account number, 

but I can find nothing to meet my needs 

on the telephone, and into my account 

(which is really the robot’s account) 

goes money, my money, to pay for nothing. 

I’m paying a robot for doing nothing. 

This call is free of charge, says the mind-reading robot. 

Yes but I'm paying for it, I shout, 

out of my wonderful account 

into my great telephone bill. 

Wonderful, says the robot. 

And my wife says, This is the future. 

I’m sorry, I don’t understand, says the robot. 

Please say Yes or No. 

Or you can say Repeat or Menu. 

You can say Yes, No, Repeat or Menu, 

Or you can say Agent if you’d like to talk 

to someone real, who is just as robotic. 

I scream Agent! and am cut off, 

and my wife says, This is the future. 

We are already there and it’s the same 

as the present. Your future, here, she says. 

And I’m talking to a robot on the phone, 

and he is giving me no options 

in the guise of countless alternatives. 

We appreciate your patience. Please hold. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. 

Eine fucking Kleine Nachtmusik. 

And the robot transfers me to himself. 

Your call is important to us, he says. 

And my translator says, This means 

your call is not important to them. 

And my wife says, This is the future. 

And my translator says, Please hold 

means that, for all your accomplishments, 

the only way you can now meet your needs 

is by looting. Wonderful, says the robot 

Please hold. Please grow old. Please grow cold. 

Please do what you’re told. Grow old. Grow cold. 

This is the future. Please hold.

.

.

by Ciaran O'Driscoll

from the journal Southword

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