Tag Archives: Poetry

From top: Niall Stokes, editor and founder of Hot Press; the magazine endorses Ivana Bacik, Labour candidate in today’s Dublin Bay South by-election

Kevin writes:

In the 2016 General Election Hot Press also endorsed the Labour Party, who had at that stage been in government for five years, implementing austerity, attempting to impose water charges, and getting the housing crisis going. Hot Press did this on the basis that only with Labour in government would the 8th amendment be repealed. This turned out not to be the case. Labour lost all but 7 of its 37 seats and were out of government. But the 8th amendment was repealed in any case in 2018. Labour actually were in government when the 8th amendment was introduced in 1983…In this poem I pay tribute to the intellectual giant that is Hot Press Editor Niall Stokes. This poem should be read while prostrating oneself in front of a large colour photograph of Michael D. Higgins, or failing that Ruairi Quinn, preferably while naked.

Soliloquy in Voice of Ageing Rock Journalist

There I was on the meditation mat
Jackson Browne gave me to mark
the year of the rat, naked apart
from what’s left of my tremendous
hair, incantating the word
“progressive” to my holy self
and the tiny birds at
the window, who are always
my best first audience,
when the truth came to me:

no other combination of parties
can deliver the certain
(and required) surge
inwhole family suicide
among those made live in the kind of hotels
not frequented by Keith Richards,
that will occur
if this government is returned,
as it must be.

I’m most famous
for having once, allegedly,
shared a hot tub, and my thoughts
on the heroic death
of Salvador Allende,
with Ireland’s baldest
living intellectual.

I’m what happens when you take
not quite enough cocaine.
During a session at Lille’s Bordello,
I once pulled Bono’s finger;
or what I thought was
Bono’s finger.

I offer these words as evidence
that I’m not actually dead yet. Satan
be good to me and what remains
of my hair.

Kevin Higgins

RollingNews

Ink

It rained last night,
A vivid flow of sorrow.
A memory caught in my throat,
The strangulation of tomorrow.
The bars of my ribcage shake with screams.
If these bones shatter will I be set free?
I meditate to medicate.
When man rejects, I wave at the sea.
In this nothingness I am hidden,
Yet I finally feel seen.

I write so I don’t go blind,
I fill my page with light –
Words from the lips of someone wiser.
Ink runs through my veins.
Metaphors bleed onto the page.
These words are for me,
Because I want to see.

I burn my composure,
Unveiling my vulnerability.

Just as my pen runs out of ink.

Aoife Cunningham

Aoife writes:

I’m 19 from Galway. I began writing poetry when I was 7. My poetry is a reflection of my circumstance. I jumped off a bridge in 2018, resulting in 7 broken bones (thankfully all healed) and I’m currently in hospital being treated for Anorexia Nervosa. I spent 8 months living in a Homeless shelter prior to my admission to hospital. My aim is to help people through the power of my words.

Aoife Cunningham

A message for Pope Francis in Dublin City Centre during the Pontiff’s visit to Ireland in August 2018

Dear, Oh Dear, Roman Catholic Church

Unrelenting cherisher of my baptismal cert.
You site historical reasons
but I know it’s more than that for you
maybe because I’m young,
historically you’ve liked that too

Unfortunately I have to go,
though it brings a tear to Gods eye
I am retracting my membership
from this book club gone awry

I have googled how to leave and conceded,
it’s way too long to read.
So I came across a site I understand
‘How to be excommunicated for dummies’
(and millennials, the two go hand in hand)

I don’t really want to physically attack the Pope
but if it has to be done
I can rally some antifa communists,
when you need help to decentralise
and redistribute a patriarchal power
– they’re the one

I could reject the authority of the Pope
or celebrate the eucharist for show
confer sacraments to myself,
or give schism or apostasy a go

I could interpret a foreign confession
and tell somebody else
if I’d ever properly learned another language
(yeah, this one may not be of help)

I suppose I could have an abortion,
if I wasn’t a lesbian
even Jesus Christ himself
couldn’t bring me that close to men

I could violate the confessional seal
but my vegan friends would not be impressed.
Heresy I can definitely do,
‘It’s a mortal sin to be underdressed’.

I’m sad as I write this,
I enabled you so long
to hurt already vulnerable people
and then tell them they are wrong

If God exists, he’s gonna be pissed,
especially at you big P
there are things that you’ll have to change
but it will not be with me.

beam

beam is a 26 year old woman from Galway, a new poet and a recent MA graduate. beam is working on her first collection after being published on Spilling Hot Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Recent work includes: ‘surviving the pandemic and several disappointing sourdough loaves’. You can find more of her poetry @personalbeam on instagram.

RollingNews

Paul Murphy TD (seated second right) during a protest against a visit to a food bank in  Jobstown, Tallaght by then Tanaiste Joan Burton

Kevin writes:

My poem in response to last evening’s episode of Reeling In The Years on RTÉ One, which covered 2014. I’ve chosen one inspired by the reaction of the common-or-garden Irish media liberal to Joan Burton’s car being blocked in Tallaght by anti-water charges protesters/

Irish Liberal Foresees Own Enduring Relevance

My words are smoother than the essential oils
the Taoiseach last week
had his parliamentary assistant rub
into his badly traumatised buttocks.
My psychotherapist insists
half the people who’ve taken
shotguns to their own heads,
during this recession, would’ve reconsidered,
if only they’d heard me talk for an hour
each week about the dangers of Sinn Féin,
or how I live in the hope of a woman Pope.

I’m all for the good people of middle Ireland
making their point in a dignified manner
with china cups of nothing stronger than tea in their hands.
But when thugs from the far parts start burning vans
and generally acting as if they owned the place;
and gurriers from the depths begin picking up bricks
and tossing words so terrible,
they’re not even in the dictionary,
at the Minister for Poverty’s hair-style.
(How would you like your wife,
sister, great grandmother,
kidnapped in her car
for two and a half hours?)

The world will not be changed by fools
banging on the bonnet of a BMW.
But by the likes of me talking
against social exclusion in TV studios.
And fundraising concerts organised
by former pop-stars.
And the well-meaning priest
with whom I regularly have dinner;
between the two us we’ve enough
concern for the poor to construct a second
Fergal Keane of the BBC,
as a back-up in case
the existing one breaks.

Trust in us. Pay no heed
to the sweary-mouthed crowd,
who if they’re not put back where they belong
will soon be eating pot noodle from scooped out skulls
confiscated from their betters
in defiance of international law.
By the likes of them,
the world must not be changed.

Kevin Higgins

Reeling in the Years: 2014 (RTE)

Members of the public pay their respects at the grounds where the unmarked mass grave containing the remains of hundreds of infants who died at the Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam Co Galway from 1925-1961 rests

Purple Violas

Mid January,
Pottering in the garden,
I sit a moment in the noon sun
Deadhead winter violas
Now heavy with seed.
On the radio, there is a state apology
For the institutional abuse,
Of countless mothers and babies,
Vulnerable and unwanted, the unholy,
Treated like dirt,
And I am heartbroken again
For a lie does not become truth,
A Wrong does not become right
Simply with acceptance.

I gather the seed pods from the spent flowers,
Lay them in rows
Along the stone wall to dry.
I will replant these babies,
Nurture them strong
An small offering for every wounded mother
In this country.

Maire Morrissey Cummins

RollingNews

Dublin coast with the Sugarloaf, County Wicklow in the distance

Death Of The Cold

Soul
Less
Desperate
December
Inertia
Lightning
Flash
Sirens
Sing
Come come come
Come to me
Crash
Into my arms
Crash into my
Smash
Into
My
Cold windswept tears
Salt foam lashed
Rocks
Of
Unforgiving
Mutation
What sign
What sign
Sign
Of the spring?
The death of the old
The death of the old
The death of the old
Come, come, come
Come in now
Before You
Catch
Your death
Of the cold
Your
Death
Of
The
Cold

Kevin Barrington

Previously: Kevin Barrington on Broadsheet

RollingNews

‘Johnny’.

A poem by George Cummins.

George writes:

A dark poem and perhaps not what people want to necessarily hear right now, but this is definitely a time that awareness is sorely needed. With the freezing weather, the massive number of homeless currently on the streets of Ireland, and Covid changing how we interact with each other, it’s integral that people are aware of the dangers this is creating for the homeless population.

Deora Dé Fuschia.

Tears of God.

Breeda writes:

Holly Mullarkey, clay artist and poet, has completed her most recent piece to honour Tuam babies and survivors of the former Mother and Baby Homes.

Earlier Holly planned supporting survivors making the teardrop shaped boats in the video above, but Covid19 put paid to those plans.

Undeterred Holly, who worked with Clay Galway in a collective for Galway 2020, set about constructing boats out of clay to represent containers of stories needing to be shared as various groups experiencing marginalisation merged for a performance on Grattan Road Beach in Galway.

Holly’s dedication to the story of the ‘Children of Tuam’ is captured and the poem recalls the lost lives of the 796 babies and children.

Holly Mullarkey