talking to strangers

28 Friday Apr 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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baseball, Damian Gorman, Derry Girls, Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, States of Play, USA politics

A month or two ago, I received an email from a stranger. A former journalist with The Financial Times who splits his time between Belfast and Baltimore, Steve McGookin, had landed on an old column I’d written for the Irish Times about my love affair with the Boston Red Sox and wondered if I might be interested in taking part in his States of Play, a project that uses baseball as a window into discussions – a series of nine Q&As – innings – with interesting folks about politics, society, and cultural connections.

Of course I said ‘yes.’ Without hesitation. After all, one of the best things about journalism as Steve points out on his website is just reaching out to random people and hoping they’ll talk to you.”

In retrospect, my only wish is that we could have had the entire conversation in the cheap seats at Fenway all the way into extra innings.

If you’re a baseball fan or if you’re just interested in the state of the nation from the perspective of an immigrant from Northern Ireland, you’ll maybe take a look, with this in mind:

At a ball game, you almost always see something you’ve never seen before. In today’s America, honestly, God only knows what we might see next.

Thanks again, Steve. Hope to see you back on the oul’ sod one day soon.

Here’s the link to my nine innings, conducted over email in the Spring of 2023 shortly before – and after – I returned to Northern Ireland to celebrate my 60th birthday which coincided with the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.

Derry Girls Mural, 18 Orchard Street, Derry, Northern Ireland

poetry: works like a charm

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by Editor in Memoir, Northern Ireland, Themes of childhood

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charm, cure, Faith, faith healer, folklore, Memoir, Miracles, Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney, World Poetry Day 2023

March 21, World Poetry Day, UNESCO recognizes again the point of poetry, celebrating it as one of our most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. The theme this year is drawn from a line of poetry by Charles Baudelaire – “Always be a poet, even in prose” – a call to observe and appreciate the power of poetry in difficult times.

In words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, the power of poetry has no match. As an intimate form of expression that opens doors to others, poetry enriches the dialogue that catalyses all human progress, and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times.

— Audrey Azoulay, Director-General.

My earliest recollection of poetry is my father’s recitation from memory of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service or Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Whenever I spot daffodils, I am immediately transported to our Dublin Road living room where my father is reciting the opening lines. Where he learned those poems, I have no idea. My father is not an academic; he did not rub shoulders with the Northern Ireland literati. My da is a maker of things. His is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike in the early 1960s. As such, he’ll make no bones about telling me that this began solely as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting, and roof-thatching.

He always whistled or he sang as he worked. With an ear for music, he could always pick out a tune on whatever instrument was within reach – “The Black Velvet Band” on a hefty piano accordian with mother of pearl keys comes to mind. He always sang in harmony to whatever was playing on the – which is probably why I so easily find harmonies when I sing – not melodies – first. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, my father made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me a violin that would one day open doors for me in far away places. My father never bought an instrument for himself, and I don’t recall him ever buying a book or borrowing one from the library – somehow poetry found him.

I’ve always thought he belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. He has the “Midas touch” of the thatcher and the grasp of the diviner, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. Once, I observed, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.” He grew up – as did my mother – in Heaney country, a place where people believed in “miracles and cures and healing wells,” and where everyone knew the “folk healer,” the individual uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed them.

The folk healer meted out charms in plasters and poultices, and potions that swirled in brown bottles. It was to the healer my father turned when the local doctor told my mother there was nothing he could prescribe for her severe bout with jaundice. Dissatisfied with this response from a man with formal medical training, my father ventured deep into the Derry countryside to the home of the man with “the charm.” Observant and eager to help even though he could not discern which wild herbs held the curing powers, my father accompanied him into the fields. He watched and then waited as the healer wordlessly concocted the charm – beat the juices from the herbs with a stone, then mixed it with two bottles of Guinness stout and poured it into a C&C lemonade bottle. He sent my father on his way with instructions for my mother to drink every last drop. There was no payment – other than faith.

Admittedly, I have always been skeptical of the faith healer but never of the faith at work in the transaction. In times of crisis, when all else fails, where do we turn? Wherever it is, faith is a part.

After he suffered a stroke in 2005, Seamus Heaney wrote “Miracle,” as part of his Human Chain collection. As he recalls the men who had to carry him up and down stairs immediately following his stroke, Heaney draws on the New Testament story of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof into Christ’s presence:

Just then some men came, carrying a paralyzed man on a bed. They were trying to bring him in and lay him before Jesus; but finding no way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the middle of the crowd in front of Jesus. When he saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” – Luke 5:18-20

In a 2009 interview Heaney said as a non-believer, “Miracle” was not a spiritual poem, but rather one that marked “being changed a bit by something happening. Every now and again you write a poem that changes gear.” I suppose every now and again we all read one that transforms us.

It was only when he suffered a stroke and had to be carried himself, Heaney realized how important those men were, and he invites us to realize the same, to “be mindful” of those who carried him – the human chain – the ones who knew him all along. Without the community of people around the sick man, there is no miracle.

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in –

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

Poet, Carol Ann Duffy, once explained in her response to the devastation of the Haiti earthquake as it unfolded on television that “we turn to poetry at intense moments in our lives . . . when we lose people, or are bereaved, we look for a piece of music or poem to read at the funeral, or when we fall in love we turn to poetry, or when children are born. And I think that can happen at moments of public grief too, as well as personal. It is so close to prayer, it is the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.”

As for Heaney, when asked about the value of poetry in turbulent times, he replied that it is precisely at such moments that people realize they need more to live than economics: “If poetry and the arts do anything,” he said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

It works like a charm.

an irish mother’s day dance

19 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by Editor in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Keeping going, Miami Showband Massacre, Mother's Day, Seamus Heaney, Trouble Songs

Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

The other day I was in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara and paused by the impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. This was no small act, with me raised in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. I’m thinking of her this morning. It is Mother’s Day where I am from, and my mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her last year.

Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my old denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have since forgotten I am drawn back to all those times she would ease into a story I had heard a time or two before, to the lessons from behind the ironing board – the one about taking time to consider the lilies; to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by. Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead after all.

Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers – tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, mass shootings anywhere in the United States, or bombs in Belfast shops – while at the same time encouraging me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.

I recall one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our little kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including the heartthrob lead singer.

Our David Cassidy was dead.

Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, people like us believed that musicians like The Miami were immune to the horrors of political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. They represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. The band was as my dear friend, bass guitarist, Stephen Travers, recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.”

That night in 1975 left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” a tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy. As Belfast writer, Stuart Bailie, points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”

The handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men whose response was to continue shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Stephen was gravely wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.

As the man on the radio continued his report, my mother kept ironing, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was horrific – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would, but many of us would leave, and maybe that’s why Granny’s final words in Kenneth Branagh’s movie Belfast pack such a punch, “Go now – don’t look back” – words I heard my own granny say to my parents so many times when I was very small. My parents toyed with the idea of immigration – South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but in the end they stayed, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years as their American grand-daugher grew up far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.

I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now, our once massive extended family growing smaller – the last of my dad’s brothers died just a few weeks ago. My mother’s brothers all dead too. I have no more uncles. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.

From the sectarian and political, to the deeply personal, Mothers Day always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I was secure in my place; I knew my steps in the dance. On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our wee back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon just as the fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.

Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

I’m thinking of all the mothers back home today, to paraphrase Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left. And for all the ones who were lost.

Thank you for staying, ma – for being home.

As between clear blue and cloud,

Between haystack and sunset sky,

Between oak tree and slated roof,

I had my existence. I was there.

Me in place and the place in me

Happy Mothers Day.

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”

“the music of what happens”

06 Friday Jan 2023

Posted by Editor in "Crediting Poetry" - Nobel Lecture 1995, British Army, Dispatch from the Diaspora, IRA, Kingsmill Road Massacre, Northern Ireland, Ruefrex, Sectarianism, The Troubles, Themes of childhood

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Alan Black, Bandit country, Bessbrook, Kingsmill Road Massacre 40th Anniversary, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Reaveys and O'Dowds Killings, Richard Hughes, Ruefrex, Seamus Heaney, South Armagh

It is January 5, 1976 at the end of a work day, and sixteen men are in a red minibus on their way home from the Glenane textile factory Four of them get out at Whitecross. and the van continues on to Bessbrook. The craic turns to football and whether Manchester United or Liverpool will make it to the top of the First Division, but it is tempered by what happened the day before when six local Catholics were murdered – brothers John Martin, Brian and Anthony Reavey, and brothers Declan and Barry O’Dowd and their uncle Joe shot dead by the Glenanne gang near Gilford. Naturally, the way none of us would have been at the time, the men aren’t alarmed by the red lamp swinging up ahead near the Kingsmills crossroads. They had expected increased security following yesterday’s murders – and this is South Armagh. This is “bandit country.”

What words work for what happens next? The men are ordered out of the van by gunmen in combat jackets who have been waiting for them in the hedges. This is not a British Army checkpoint. The workers are told to line up and put their hands on the roof of the van. They are asked to state their religion – Protestant or Catholic. There is only one Catholic among them, Richard Hughes, and when he is asked to identify himself, his Protestant workmates are terrified. In their dread, in their desire to protect him, they cover his hands with theirs.

It is this moment that is forever lodged in a tight space in that corner of my heart that never left Northern Ireland. It is this moment – this split second of humanity – that Seamus Heaney recollects in his 1995 Nobel lecture

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA

All in vain. In less than a minute, ten of the men are gunned down and left to die on the side of a road slippery with rain and blood.

Tit-for-tat.

Forty-seven years later, the sole survivor, Alan Black, seeks no revenge. A survivor – and a witness – he is often stuck in those moments when, shot 18 times, he was left for dead. Every January, he finds himself going “into countdown mode — I look at the calendar and at the clock and think to myself ‘the boys have only five days or five hours or five minutes to live’, right up to the time of the ambush.” He seeks acknowledgement and justice for the boys and their families. He seeks answers that may never come.

These men are known to me only through the tiniest details from a Belfast Telegraph article written over a decade ago “Joseph Lemmon, whose wife was standing over their tea as he died; Reginald Chapman, a Sunday school teacher who played football for Newry Town; his younger brother Walter Chapman; Kenneth Worton, whose youngest daughter had not even started school; James McWhirter, who belonged to the local Orange lodge; Robert Chambers, still a teenager and living with his parents; James McConville, who was planning to train as a missionary; John Bryans, a widower who left two children orphaned; and Robert Freeburn, who was also a father of two. The van driver, Robert Walker, came from near Glenanne.”

The answers may never come, nor justice, given what many of us expect with regard to the Legacy Bill. We know families of victims have waited decades for truth and justice. We know some have died, old and heartbroken, without answers or acknowledgement. The truth – and acknowledgement of wrongdoing – demands courageous and arduous work that can be trusted. It demands a commitment to accountability, and an assurance for everyone – everyone – that the historical record will stand the test of time. As Susan McCay once reminded us “The absence of reconciliation has never been more starkly apparent, and as usual, those most hurt in the past are hurt again.”

What also remains for us and what belongs to us, is humanity and courage on the side of a country road in South Armagh forty years ago. We would do well to hold on to it.

The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.