P.S. Thank you, Seamus Heaney.

30 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by Editor in A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground

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Fifth Anniversary of Heaney's Death, Irish DIASPORA, Noli Timere, Seamus Heaney, The Underground, Van Morrison

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996

Dear Seamus,

Seven years since you left us, I want you to know your poems are still with me, showing up like true friends to catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I never had the chance to tell you in person how much I loved the words that scored so many episodes of my life. So it is in a recurring and imaginary conversation, that we are standing at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge. It has begun to rain and the 110 bus is late. I’m glad. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our Laureate – remark on the drizzle. Colloquial, you remind me of the way my father speaks. I agree and, before it is too late, I find inadequate words to thank you . . .

. . . for every time I was braver and bolder because of something you had written; for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy; for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest and smallest of things; and, for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

Ma’s Bookshelf – By Sophie

In the very worst of times, cleaved in two by loss, I turned to you because only your words worked – certain and sure. I remember when you died, we were all a bit lost, struck by a collective realization that only you would be capable of producing the words that would even begin to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing. Somebody even said that your death left a breach in the language itself. Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I was caught again in limbo – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – like Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold.

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

This morning, I am pulled back again to “The Underground.” It has always been one of my favorite – all the more since finding out it was a favorite of yours too and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry, ‘The Underground” was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

You never looked back.

When I heard that your final words were in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I thought of your Orpheus in the Underworld and the Latin you loved:

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”

No longer the shy and fretting young poet who signed his first poems Incertus, you left what was needed – simple and spare, a forward-looking reassurance. As you had told us once before, that “it is important to be reassured.”

Thank you, Seamus. I am reassured and looking forward. I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.

Codladh sámh.

Caught One More Time . . . Happy Birthday, Van Morrison.

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by Editor in A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun

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BBC Radio Ulster, Cyprus Avenue, Homesickness, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, Sense of Wonder, Van Morrison 70th Birthday

Original post for Van Morrison’s 70th birthday ~ Cyprus Avenue, Belfast, 2015

“And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it”

~ from “Had I Not Been Awake” In The Human Chain by Seamus Heaney.

Had I not been awake early one hot summer morning, I would have missed the goings-on on Cyprus Avenue. It was Van Morrison’s 70th birthday – Van Morrison whose music – like Seamus Heaney’s poetry – has scored much of my life. For the crowd gathered up on Cyprus Avenue to celebrate his birthday with him, a sense of wonder; for me, a homesickness Stephen King rightly describes as “a terribly keen blade.”

Social media and BBC Radio Ulster did their best to assuage the lump-in-my-throat melancholy – while at the same time making it worse – reminding me of the thousands of miles that stretch between there and here.

I am not there.

I am not there, with my college friend Ruth, to sing along and wonder if he might indulge us with a rendition of Cyprus Avenue which everyone surely wants to hear – for old times sake and because it is fitting. But you never know where you are with Van; you just remember where you are from.

Eight hours behind and a lifetime away, I related easily to those fans who traveled from other continents to sit among the eighty five trees that guard Cyprus Avenue and absorb Van’s Belfast, if only for an hour or two. Clicking on the link to the BBC Radio Ulster broadcast, I was transported instantly to my teenage bedroom in my parent’s house on the Dublin Road, tuning in to Radio Luxembourg – in the Days Before Rock and Roll.

Justin . . .

I am down on my knees
At those wireless knobs
Telefunken, Telefunken
And I’m searching for
Luxembourg, Luxembourg,
Athlone, Budapest, AFN,
Hilversum, Helvetia
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll

Specific and evocative, the names of streets in Van Morrison’s songs – Hyndford Street, Cyprus Avenue, Fitzroy – as much as the characters that people them and the rituals that shaped those lives – Madame George, the window cleaners taking a break for tea with Paris Buns from the shop, you taking the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, kids collecting bottle-tops, all of us tuning into Radio Luxembourg on our transistor radios, going to the pictures, or the chipper, and filling ourselves with pastie suppers, gravy rings, Wagon Wheels, barmbrack, Snowballs – all these with a Sense of Wonder that has a universal resonance.

And all the time going to Coney Island I’m thinking,
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?

I understand the pull that brought fans from other continents to Cyprus Avenue that day. They remind me of the time I drove from Tucson to Tucumcari and Tehachapi to Tonopah – places Lowell George immortalized in Willin’. While they turned out not to tourist destinations, nor did I see Dallas Alice in every headlight, I could hear Billy Payne’s grace notes on the piano and Lowell George growling about her every mile I covered. Too, I remember my first visit to San Francisco, drawn less by St. Dominic’s Preview and more by the sight of orange boxes scattered against a SafeWay supermarket in the rain. Can you hear the echo of Patrick Kavanagh in Van Morrison’s songs. I can. And I can understand how he might be finding God in ‘the bits and pieces of everyday.”

As a new mother, almost eighteen years ago, far away from my Northern Ireland home and in Arizona, it was “Brown Eyed Girl” that I sang to my green-eyed girl to help her fall asleep. When she did her first little dance as a toddler, a jaunty “Bright Side of the Road” kept her going. As she twirled and clapped her hands, I reminisced about a wee dander down Sunnyside Street, heading out with my friends on a Saturday night, and this song, so jaunty that it was used as the promotional jingle for a “Belfast’s got the buzz” campaign, around the time our wee country was picking itself up from all that had ravaged it for so long.

When I got over getting cancer and when I turned a corner in the world of widowhood, it was to my favorite Van Morrison song that I turned and turn. “When the Healing has Begun,” is a tour de force from “Into the Music,” the first Van record I bought from Ronnie Miller’s Pop-In record store in Antrim. A far more satisfying thing than the school lunch I was supposed to buy – it fed my soul. I played it until I knew the lyrics by heart. And there they stayed until about twenty years later when I found a pristine copy, a German import, still in its protective plastic, at Tracks on Wax then a treasure trove for lovers of vinyl in Phoenix, Arizona – before vinyl became cool and collectible for a new generation.

I had worn out that song, which required some effort. In the days before record players like mine had to compete with tape decks, CD players, and MP3 files, if I wanted to hear a song just one more time or just the opening breath of it, there was no simple replay button, no nonchalant click; rather, the knack of placing the stylus right in the groove, in “the sweet spot,” where it would pick up the familiar repetitive rhythm, the violins, a “yeah” from Van, and “we’ll walk down the avenue again.”

Cyprus. Fitzroy. Belfast. Phoenix. it matters not. We are anywhere and everywhere. We are underneath the stars. Neither here nor there. It enchants me still – and maybe even Van himself – this song that takes him from a roar through a mumble to a barely there whisper at the end. And when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert with appreciative whistles from a Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Hypnotized momentarily. Such is the “aesthetic force” of that song for me.

Back street jelly roll . . .

And all the way back to the first time I saw him perform it, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Leaning forward from the good seats in the balcony – having scored tickets from a friendly roadie in the Crown Bar – it was like being in church, somehow knowing we should behave and be quiet, reverent even, if he was going to take us along with him on this song. And he did.

And the healing begins . . .

And we’ll walk down the avenue in style
And we’ll walk down the avenue and we will smile
And we’ll say baby ain’t it all worthwhile
When the healing has begun

Thank you, Van. For all of it. Happy Birthday.

Dear Seamus Heaney,

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by Editor in A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground

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Fifth Anniversary of Heaney's Death, Irish DIASPORA, Noli Timere, Seamus Heaney, The Underground, Van Morrison

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996

Dear Seamus Heaney,

Six years since you left us, I want to let you know your poems are still with me, all those well-crafted words showing up like old and true friends who catch my heart off-guard and blow it open. I often wish I’d had the chance to let you know in person, that one day, maybe at the bus-stop down the road from Barney’s Forge, our paths would cross. All “happed up” in your duffel coat, you – our laureate – would remark on the drizzle. It would be colloquial, reminding me of the way my father speaks – and I would agree and then weave in a thank you before it was too late.

I would thank you for all those times I was braver and bolder because of something you had written, and for the way you schooled me to love from afar the language and the graveled lanes of Castledawson and Bellaghy. I would thank you for showing me how to “credit marvels” in the unlikeliest small things, and for nudging me to set down words on a page or light up a screen with them, so I might one day be able, “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” But the opportunity eluded me.

My Mother’s Bookshelf – By Sophie

Over the years, during the worst of times for those I love and who love me, when I didn’t know what to say, I would turn to your pitch-perfect poetry and wrap up my condolences in your certain sure words. When you died, Seamus, I remember being struck by the realization that only you would be capable of producing the right words to assuage Ireland’s sorrow over your passing. Only you. You always had the right word right when I needed it, when I found myself in “limbo land,” uncertain – Incertus – between faith and doubt, a rock and a hard place, fear and wonder, magic and loss – myth and reality – maybe not unlike Van Morrison’s dweller on the threshold

If you have the words . . . there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.

On this, the sixth anniversary of your death, I am pulled back to “The Underground,” one of my favorite poems. I didn’t know until recently that it was a favorite of yours too, and that back in 2009, when asked to choose a poem or two that would exemplify your lifetime achievement in poetry, ‘The Underground’ was one of them.

The Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

You never looked back.

When I found out that your final words were in the form of a text to your wife from your hospital bed, I remembered your Orpheus in the Underworld, and the Latin you loved.

Noli Timere.

Just two words from an ancient world illuminating a tiny dark space – “Be not afraid.”

There was a surety in that, wasn’t there? All those years after first publishing your poems under a pseudonym, Incertus (Uncertain), you left us with a simple, spare, and forward-looking reassurance, reminding us of what you had told us once before, that “it is important to be reassured.”

So thank you, Seamus. I am still looking forward. I am walking on air.

For that, I am forever in your debt.

Codladh sámh.

a rainy day in phoenix – remembering phil lynott

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by Editor in Anahorish, Dispatches from the Diaspora, Joseph O'Connor, Memoir

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Belfast, Joseph O'Connor, Lyric Theater, Phil Lynott, photography, Seamus Heaney, The Lyric Theater, Thin Lizzy, travel, Water Mark

It wasn’t until I turned fifty that I realized that: a) I would never make enough money to go to a job I hate every day and b) money really isn’t everything although I have often acted as though it is. Much to the chagrin of Suze Orman, I don’t organize it neatly in a wallet, and I honestly couldn’t tell you how much of it is in my checking account at any given time. If I must choose between making a payment for something essential like a house or springing for a hard-bound signed copy of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel speech, “Crediting Poetry,” well, there is no choice which leads me back to an August afternoon in 2013, just two weeks before Heaney died.

Time and space collapsed when I spotted the handsome little volume perched on a shelf in an air-conditioned out-of-print fine books store next to a used car dealership in Phoenix, about as far away as I could be from Anahorish, “where springs washed into the shiny grass.” I didn’t buy the signed first US edition that afternoon, but I felt so guilty for having abandoned it there, that I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would return, with an explanation to the avuncular Phoenician bookseller, of the finer points of buying ‘on tick.’

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Previously, the best money I ever spent was in 1982. Flush with my university grant money, I bought three things that would change my life – a Eurail pass, a 35mm camera, and a hi-fi stereo system. I moved out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College, Belfast, and into a red-brick terraced house on Ridgeway Street, where I lived with four male engineering students who tolerated my girliness and threw great parties without ever damaging any of my vinyl.

At the lower end of our street was The Lyric Theater and at the top, The Belfast Wine Company, a convenient and well-stocked off-license.

Ridgeway_Street,_Belfast_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1325037

Ridgeway Street, Belfast, N. Ireland

In the middle, these houses teemed with university students. All imaginative misfits, most of us going to our classes only when there was nothing else to do. What sparkles in my memory this morning is one glorious evening on Ridgeway Street, when we spilled out of our houses and onto the road, pelting each other with water balloons while the frontman of Thin Lizzy, a very cool Phil Lynott, leaned against the door jamb of a house full of art students from Derry. I have no idea what he was doing there, but he was enjoying himself. Maybe he got lost on the way to wherever he was supposed to be staying after the Lizzy gig at The Kings Hall. In my mind’s eye he is as plain as day, smoking and laughing at us as we soaked each other, on the kind of shimmering spring night that transforms Northern Ireland into a veritable tourist destination.

Decades later and all the vinyl records bought with my lunch money and my university grant, are stowed away in the roof-space of my parent’s house in Castledawson. Faded and stashed between the pages of an old diary, the Eurail pass took me to places that have stayed in my heart to this day – Paris, Florence, Rome, Capri, the Greek islands. The Olympus camera? It was stolen from my first apartment in Phoenix.

It took thirty years and a breast cancer diagnosis before I would buy another 35mm camera, when I was ready finally to take stock and see things through different lenses. In the Fall of 2012, a friend and I enrolled in a college photography class that required us to pay attention to shapes and patterns and all the lines and curves we might otherwise miss going about my daily business. The photography teacher’s assignments sent me on scavenger hunts every Sunday to spots like the “Water Mark,” where five 14-foot aluminum horses that guard a road in Scottsdale. Some folks believe it should be designated a wonder of the world, but my teacher just wanted me to notice it, to pay attention to those splendid horses that evoke the Wild West but also prevent flooding during our Monsoon season. At such times, water gushes from the horse’s mouths, and it is an awesome sight.

1073782_10201634577847386_1908612081_o

Now I know those wild horses belong in the Arizona desert where the rains are rare, but I prefer to think of them along the Annadale Embankment, watching over us at the end of a wild Belfast night.

Footnote: The Heaney Lecture is now where it belongs – on a shelf in my house between Door into the Dark and Stepping Stones . As for Phil? His band would disintegrate a few months after that night on Ridgeway Street, and just three years later, Phil Lynott would slip away from us. Today would have been his 70th birthday.

As Joseph O’Connor explains, Phil was “the first Irish person ever to bound onto a stadium stage in leather trousers and bawl to the gods: “Are you OUT there?” He was our first rock star, gone too soon, and on a rainy night in Phoenix, some three decades later, I can still hear his coyote call . . .

But there is the replenishing joy of the songs themselves, that carnival of outlaws, renegades and chancers, tumbling through the sunbursts of his rhymes. From the lonesome cowboy’s prairie to the louche streets of Soho, from the mythic Celtic battlefields over to Dino’s bar and grill, his restless creativity roamed. You could stock a damn good jukebox with only his work, so vivid the eye for detail and so capacious its reach . . . The songs will abide. That’s the only consolation. But it’s a real one. Even in the darkest night, you can always hear the king’s call.

I will find him on a jukebox far from Ridgeway Street tonight.