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Anahorish, Anahorish, Antrim, Arizona, Bellaghy, Borders, British Army, Broagh, Castledawson, Dennis O'Driscoll, Fosterling, From the Republic of Conscience, grandmother, IRA, Language matters, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Personal Helicon, Poetry, Politics, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Tony Parker, Writing
back to Anahorish ~ Seamus Heaney’s ‘first hill in the world’
Our poet, Seamus Heaney, will be buried in Bellaghy tomorrow evening, his body brought home from Dublin to rest next to the grave of his little brother, Christopher, whom many of us know from “Mid-Term Break,” a poem now learned by heart by Irish children in schools North or South of the border. The first time, I heard Mid-Term Break, was…
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Governor Jan Brewer, Immigration, Memoir, Politics, Racial Profiing, SB1070, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism
SB 1070 & the music of what happens
It was just three years ago. I was sitting in my office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s announcement regarding SB1070. Surely she would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented…
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Borders, Bruce Springsteen, DREAM Act, Human Rights, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Photography
achtung baby . . . if walls could talk.
I always thought Robert Frost was right to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it was that good fences make good neighbors: Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love…
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Belfast, Bullying, Damian Gorman, Eleventh Night Bonfires, Family, Friendships, Jilly Cooper, Memoir, Northern Ireland Culture, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood
skipping out of northern ireland – an incendiary subject
“On yonder hill there stands a lady Who she is, I do not know. All she wants is gold and silver, All she wants is a handsome beau . . .” My breath quickens with every tentative jump over the skipping rope, its ends twirled by two girls who are singing about the lady standing on the hill. I am wearing…
