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"Crediting Poetry" - Nobel Lecture 1995, British Army, Dispatch from the Diaspora, IRA, Kingsmill Road Massacre, Northern Ireland, Ruefrex, Sectarianism, The Troubles, Themes of childhood
“the music of what happens”
It is January 5, 1976 at the end of a work day, and sixteen men are in a red minibus on their way home from the Glenane textile factory Four of them get out at Whitecross. and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and whether Manchester United or Liverpool will make it to the top of the First…
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Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time
Ready to Turn ~ Winter Solstice 2015
Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Being young, Belfast, bombing, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Heartbreak Beat, Northern Ireland, Paris Attack, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Psychedelic Furs, The Troubles, War
Paris – Heartbreak Beat.
“They stopped France when its guard was down,” announces the BBC reporter from a TV in the corner of my house so far away from Paris. Of course they did. I should know by now that a popular concert venue in Paris on a Friday night is not an unexpected place, that there are some for whom Paris is “a legitimate target.” I…
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A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun
We’ll walk down the avenue again . . .
From Cyprus Avenue on Van Morrison's 70th birthday - when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert, and the appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Back street jelly roll . . .
