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racism – when you can’t breathe and you don’t speak.
It is the anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death, and I am thinking about why Mandela mattered so much to so many of us. To me, he represented what could be. Like Martin Luther King‘s dream of what America could be and like the peace once envisioned for Northern Ireland by Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a democratic rainbow-nation inspired the first all-race democratic election, moving more than 17 million black South Africans to vote for the first time. Such a sight to behold, even on a television screen on the other side of the world – a reminder that anything can happen, that Seamus Heaney‘s hope…
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Art, Belfast, British Army, Christmas, Memoir, Photography, Saying Thank You, Thanksgiving, Van Morrison, Writers
thank goodness, thanksgiving & astral weeks
In the Fall of 2012, I enrolled in a college photography class, something I had been meaning to do for the previous three decades. I just never got around to it before, what with all my busy-ness and so much time spent bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher and waiting patiently for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep to ask if I would please be one of his Heartbreakers. I loved the photography instructor. A Nikon gal like me, she also had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than…
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Blackberry Picking, Clearances, Family, Feminism, nikki giovanni, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Poetry, removing training wheels, Rites of passage, Rituals, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Themes of childhood, Time, Wheels within Wheels
a year since you left us ~ noli timere
“Bicycles: because love requires trust and balance.” NIKKI GIOVANNI “The first grip I ever got on things Was when I learnt the art of pedalling (By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove Its back wheel preternaturally fast.” ~ from Wheels within Wheels by SEAMUS HEANEY Ah, Seamus, I sometimes think you could have scored my life with your bicycling and blackberry picking and your potato-peeling at the kitchen sink with your mother when “all the others were away at Mass.” Sitting at my kitchen table, in Phoenix, Arizona, a lifetime away from Anahorish, my mother recalled you as a young man with sandy hair, riding your bicycle around Castledawson. You…
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at the going down of the sun . . . we will remember them
Remembrance helps us to learn about our shared history, that includes people across faith and ethnic backgrounds. There’s no point in a shared history if we forget about it. ~ Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future An October 2012 YouGov poll commissioned by British Future, a non-partisan Think Tank dedicated to exploring national identity, the very crux of who we are, reveals that less than half of respondents aged 16 to 24 can identify 1914 as the year World War I broke out. More than half are unaware of the contributions of other countries to the British war effort. Australia, Kenya, India, Canada . . . all sent men, money, and munitions. In…
