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Silent Night – from Scotland to Sandy Hook.
December 14, 2012 Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty little children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a crime scene that the 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 stunned families…
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Aging, An Ulster Twilight, Castledawson, Christmas, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
Another Ulster Twilight
It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a big satin bow in her hair, the little girl is the picture of happiness, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, and it is equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers – her first big word. Even now, I like saying the word and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, a firm hold, balance. By all accounts, Santa had not read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science in which the professor wholly dismisses training wheels, pointing out, obviously, that they do not teach how to…
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For My Grandfather – on the Centenary of Armistice Day. Dulce et Decorum Est.
My grandfather died on June 22, 1977, a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on that day, he would have been wearing his pressed suit, with medals and a poppy attached to the lapels, not unlike those pensioners gathered respectfully at the Cenotaph where at 10:43am where, with chilling choreography, an IRA bomb exploded, killing eleven and wounding 68. Granda would have done it not for show, but to remember his dead pals. As we commemorate the centenary of Armistice day, I am remembering my grandfather, who fought in the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, and I am remembering those old men gathered in remembrance at…
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"Crediting Poetry" - Nobel Lecture 1995, British Army, Dispatch from the Diaspora, IRA, Kingsmill Road Massacre, Northern Ireland, Sectarianism, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Tree of Life Synagogue Pittsburgh
“The Music of What Happens” – for Pittsburgh
They say he yelled “All Jews must die,” when he stormed into the Tree of Life Synagogue on the Sabbath in Pittsburgh this morning. Armed with an assault rifle and three hand guns, he slaughtered 11 people within minutes, silencing forever their joyful prayers. I read that when Rabbi Joseph Miller learned of the shooting, not quite a mile away from his synagogue, he ordered the doors locked. Although his congregation was terrified that they would be next, they recited the mi sheberach – praying not for their own protection, but for the healing of others. There are reports that a few hours before he went on his deadly rampage, the shooter…
