Delighted to have my poems – and video of Maeve’s Version – published in “Trasna“, an online journal out of Lowell, Massachusetts edited by Christine O’Connor, Margaret O’Brien and Jeannie Judge.
The Air is Alive with Fear and Care
When people greet in South Sudan, they hold hands for many minutes – half an hour if the warmth is strong, the bond of kin or friendship. How is your mother? Your aunt? Your son? And your herd of cattle – thriving? Did the speckled cow survive the difficult birth?
Now the air crackles between us, friend or stranger, in every nation. Two metres. Six feet, the length and depth of a coffin. I walk a narrow path in the woods, meet a man with an unleashed terrier. Will he step to his side, mirror my care? He does.
We smile, we breathe a sigh. The air is alive with fear and care.
On the lake the Swans continue their slow courtship. I am learning the songs of the residents – Blackbird, Robin, Song Thrush, Wren – while they have the forest to themselves.
The evenings are longer by the day. There is no call to quarantine the birds. Larks exhilarate, Starlings murmurate, dark swirls against a clouded sky.
Soon the explorers will arrive from Africa – Cuckoo and Swallow, the creaking Corncrake, not yet extinct. Our small island will levitate with their cacophony, their mating joy. They will tell again their noisy stories, how they navigate by star maps and the magnets in their eyes.
Leave us our green walks, I pray.
O makers of the rules of wise restraint, let me be close to the wisdom of Hazel, let me watch her leaves unfurl out of the cell of winter.
I can do this, I tell myself. Cocoon. Lock-down. Self-isolate.
And if they say I cannot walk between the trees, there is still my garden, small and unruly, in need of love.
I can do this, however long it takes.
If every day I can rinse my heart clean of fear. If I can fill my lungs with God’s green air.
ghamArts #CreativityAgainstCorona
Here’s my piece, “Planning Permission for a Bee Hotel“, broadcast on Sunday Miscellany on October 13 – in celebration of wrens, bees, hedgehogs, and the excellent people at pollinators.ie and the Organic Centre. Thanks too to Sarah Binchy and Carolyn Dempsey of Sunday Miscellany, and all at the Abbey Art Centre, Ballyshannon. To hear the full programme, with Olive Travers, Little John Nee, Winifred McNulty, and Denise Blake, plus excellent music, click here.
Happy to say that my memory piece about staying up late to watch the first moon landing will be broadcast on Sunday Miscellany this coming Sunday, July 14.
Available as a podcast here.
Photo: Kigali, Rwanda by Maxine Niyomwungeri on Unsplash.com; Layout by Loretta Brennan, Africa Magazine
Delighted to have a story included in the Quantum Shorts contest for quantum-inspired flash fiction. For devotees of Alice Liddell, Erwin Schrödinger, and their curious and fabulous cats… 
I’m grateful to Africa Magazine for providing me with a wonderful outlet for my writing – Africa-related and otherwise, new and old, poetry and prose. This poem appears in the May issue of Africa, and appeared previously in the excellent Antiphon Poetry Magazine http://antiphon.org.uk/images/i15/Antiphon%20issue%2015.pdf
In the current issue of Africa Magazine.
November 9th, 2050. Trump Day again. Not that he lasted long himself, died of a heart attack in his third year. In his bed, they said, but I doubt that he was sleeping. People got all riled up after he was inaugurated, street fights, gun fights, police on black, white on Latino, country on city, straight on gay, men on women – though that riot was held in private, the Trump boys pumped up and strutting, I’m the Lord of the Manor. And while all that was going on the Republican House and the Republican Senate quietly shifted the goalposts. An electoral boundary here, a state attorney there, mysterious deaths in high places. But we were all so fixated on Trump that nobody noticed. When he died, his VP stepped in. What was his name? P-something.
My mind’s getting fuzzy, I used to be sharp as a tack. Still, not bad for ninety-two. I want to remember, there are so few of us left to remember the good years. O how we whinged and moaned back then, wanting everything to be right. We didn’t know what wrong looked like. Pence! That was it. Mike Pence. He stepped in, quiet as a suit. Helped to calm the worst of the riots, I’ll give him that, but the real damage was done.
Thirty-four years of Republican rule. They held the mid-term elections yesterday, all panoply and brouhaha, but I don’t vote. Others vote. They go through the charade, they still call our country a democracy, but the democrats tore themselves apart years ago, and the Fat Cats rule unopposed.
It’s illegal to call them that, but in the quiet of my mind, and with those I trust, few as we are, that’s what I call them. The Fat Cat Party. And we, the Others, we are the skinny feral mangy cats on the margins, fighting for scraps. I remember when the margins of life were spacious, when Others had choices. Now it’s live or die, and not much between. Why have I held on so long, when all I love are gone? Because I’m a tough old biddy, I suppose. Because people want to hear my stories. And because still the dawn is beautiful – more beautiful with all the clog in the air. Strange, the compensations.
I’d like to tell my story one more time. One last time, I’ll be going soon. The Others listen to me the way once I listened to fairytales. How it used to be. How it might be again. I know they don’t believe me, I doubt it myself. But maybe. I sow seeds, that’s my job. I’m a gardener of the mind. So here we are, children, it’s Trump Day again. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time…
