-
Belfast, Blogging, Brian Baird, cancer, Education, Fathers and sons, favorite teacher, Memoir, News, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism, Social Media, television, The Diviner, The Forge, The Troubles, Walter Kronkite, Writing
credit to a newsman: teacher appreciation day 2022
Once upon a time, before news traveled at break-neck speed to our smart phones and our Cable TV networks, we waited for it. We had no choice, and when “the news” came on at teatime, it was a serious affair that demanded our attention. It was rarely, if ever, about a new animal born at the zoo or a celebrity’s wardrobe…
-
Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
a dance for mother’s day
It is Mother’s Day in Ireland. I am hoping the flowers arrived and that the florist remembered to write on the card, “I’ll see you next weekend.” It’s been a long three years, the pandemic and its attendant restrictions keeping us apart. As my brother – only 250 odd miles away from her – reminded me, “this thing has made…
-
When the Ancients Speak to Us
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 the turning point I look…
-
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
My Father’s Ulster Twilight
The bare bulb, a scatter of nails, Shelved timber, glinting chisels: In a shed of corrugated iron Eric Dawson stoops to his plane At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve. Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave, Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl, A rub with a rag of linseed oil … It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s…
