Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

The End and the Beginning

    The End and the Beginning After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag…

Continue Reading

Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Minor Miracle

A  bike ride in the country. A conversation interrupted by a near accident and the shock of a racist chance encounter. The ride resumes only to be interrupted again by a moment of menace.  And then something quite unexpected happens.. I love the way the poet just drops us into the middle of what seems like an ongoing conversation. As if…

Continue Reading

Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Two Lorries

Two Lorries  It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes. There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother. Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt? But it’s raining and he still has half the load To deliver farther on. This…

Continue Reading

Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, The Cat

Cats Sleep Anywhere

Sleeping is one of the things cats do best. Which is lucky because it limits the number of minutes and hours in the day that the cat plugs into the socket and goes on a wired rampage of electric energy. Sleeping one of their better qualities and most advanced skills. Cats, it seems, do not suffer from insomnia and are capable…

Continue Reading

Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Aubade

An aubade is a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning. By the 1930’s it was clear that the war that was supposed to end all wars was not going to. MacNeice wrote this in 1934 and it well expresses a sense of impending doom. Not the dawn of a bright new era of hope and fresh…

Continue Reading

Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Moonlight

Moonlight What time the meanest brick and stone Take on a beauty not their own, And past the flaw of builded wood Shines the intention whole and good, And all the little homes of man Rise to a dimmer, nobler span; When colour’s absence gives escape To the deeper spirit of the shape,– Then earth’s great architecture swells Among her…

Continue Reading

Art, Film, Photography, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Abandoned Farmhouse

Abandoned Farmhouse He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a…

Continue Reading

Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The hand that signed the paper

In light of decision-making by executive order and the White House signing ceremonies that seem to exude smug gloating – a poem and pictures. Decisions, signings, authorizations, treaties, orders have consequences. The hand that signed the paper  The hand that signed the paper felled a city; Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, Doubled the globe of dead and halved a…

Continue Reading

Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Tides

Tides O patient shore, that canst not go to meet Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest Thou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest, When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet, He turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet That other shore may be, that to thy breast He must return? And when in sterner test He folds…

Continue Reading

Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

On the Fifth Day

On the Fifth Day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers. The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air, and the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees. Someone, from deep in the Badlands, began posting facts.…

Continue Reading

Art, Film, Photography, Food, Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A Polished Performance

A Polished Performance Citizens of the polished capital Sigh for the towns up country, And their innocent simplicity. People in the towns up country Applaud the unpolished innocence Of the distant villages. Dwellers in the distant villages Speak of a simple unspoilt girl, Living alone, deep in the bush. Deep in the bush we found her, Large and innocent of…

Continue Reading

Poetry, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Power

Power by Audre Lorde The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my…

Continue Reading

Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Those School Brochures: How to stand out from the crowd

If you’re in the market for an independent school – or a college for that matter – you will have seen your fill of those wonderful shiny brochures aka viewbooks that now primarily reside on websites. And as you read, you think Wow! This sounds good. Look at this stuff they do and how they care and how kids excel.…

Continue Reading

Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Traveler, there is no road

Traveler, there is no road Caminante, no hay camino Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. As you walk, you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again. Traveler, there is no road; only a…

Continue Reading

Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

Song of the Dark Ages

Song of the Dark Ages We digged our trenches on the down    Beside old barrows, and the wet White chalk we shovelled from below; It lay like drifts of thawing snow    On parados and parapet: Until a pick neither struck flint    Nor split the yielding chalky soil, But only calcined human bone: Poor relic of that Age…

Continue Reading