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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 Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered – brothers John Martin, Brian and Anthony Reavey, and brothers Declan and Barry O’Dowd and their uncle Joe shot dead by the Glenanne gang near Gilford. Naturally, the way none of us would…
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Dispatches from the Diaspora, Friendship, Happy New Year, Milestones, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Time
A Place Called Hope – Happy New Year
Dangerous pavements… But this year I face the ice with my father’s stick~ Seamus Heaney On New Year’s Eve, two years ago, health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Since then – as we all now know – the virus spread to nearly every country, killing over 6.6 million people and decimating the world’s economies. Amid fireworks and countdowns on this last day of 2022, China is again battling a surge of infections nationwide, after it recently – and abruptly – rolled back the stringent zero-COVID policy it had in place for almost three years. There are widespread reports…
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Magic Time
Dawn light began stealingThrough the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stonesMillennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reminder – a reassurance – that the light will come. Marked by ancient rituals that help us keep the faith and not necessarily in a god or in any religious doctrine, the Solstice is a reminder that something good is coming. …
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Too many silent nights
December 14, 2012 Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crime scene, just a day before, was a school. The medical examiner’s team begins its work through the night to make sure there are no mistakes, no shadow of doubt about the names of those children – 12 girls, eight boys – along with those of six women shot at close range by a 20 year-old man, whose name everyone now knows. Later, a state trooper is assigned to each anguished family in close-knit Newtown, Connecticut, as they wait for confirmation of what they already know. And,…
