splashings

in the pool of evening
quick silver
ripples widening
forever

cold water thing
risen to exult
in some unthinking imagining
ordinary is wonder enough

what do fishes dream

fortunes of war

Scanning the internet for life forms.
My eyes alight on a broadcast by Mr Cenk Uygur.
Cenk Uygur runs an opinion and commentary channel styled The Young Muslims.
He is a capable fellow and robust in debate.
Tonight he is happy.
Very happy.
Positively gleeful.
He appears to be having some sort of an orgasm live on air.
It's not pretty.
I listen to the words between the ululations of joy.
Presently it becomes clear that he is happy because a presenter at the Fox News television station has been fired.
The presenter is Bill O'Reilly.
As Cenk Uygur tells it, Bill O'Reilly has been fired because a woman, whom Cenk Uygur has never met and whose integrity he has no direct insight into, says Bill O'Reilly's behaviour towards her in the studio twenty years ago amounted to sexual harassment.
The firing of Bill O'Reilly seems like the happiest day of Cenk Uygur's life.
He is in paroxysms.
He is almost apoplectic.
His joy is unbounded.
Cenk Uygur has as per usual come to a conclusion based on a critical assessment of the available facts which is the exact opposite of the conclusion I would come to.
How strange.
No, not that he disagrees with me.
How strange for a man of Cenk Uygur's accomplishments to gloat because a rival has been fired.
How very very strange.
And perhaps a little bit undignified.

fanfare

The goodness of God shines in all that he has made.
The mountains, the forests the oceans and the streams, proclaim his majesty and truth.
Every human being describes in their inmost heart some unique genius of the creator.
The universe would not have been complete without each one of us.
He made us for joy.
Creation is resplendent.
Oh Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in one, one in three, eternal God, light of the world, light of souls.
Heaven is closer than we think.
God is here.
Wilderness and city alike proclaim him.
The animals evince his graciousness, his artistry, his wondrousness, his elan.
Languages are talismans of his glory.
For a moment listen.
He is calling you.

centenary

(lines written after the performance of a musical drama at the national concert hall dublin in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the 1916 rising)

the seats are packed
with lawyers nurses teachers and civil servants too
young and old in finery bedecked
children swathed in scarlet and blue
whilest on the stage prancing charlatans sing
about the innate glory of 1916

there is something absent here
there is something hollow here
no smell of cordite sickens delicate nostrils
the cries of the dying are theatrical and do not offend the ear
the bloodstains are artistically daubed
no bullet kills
for reality must not intrude
upon our valedictorean interlude

besuited ronald sits with coiffeured maisie
and pats her lily ass
oh darling he sighs elevated
i do so love the working class

i wish a gawping rahman would come
lurching down the stalls
with his gun drawn
and pick out one of them
he'd shoot them in the knees or in the bawls
for some perceived insult to his republc
or some mild inconveniencing
of the drug dealing child abusing people trafficking
heroic
i
r
a
let the besuited coiffeured ones look on
at the tortures they are celebrating in song

i really do wish it might come to pass
that these would know real blood and death and tears
then there would be no more twee jingles about the pseudo heroism of the working class
to mock the spattered corpses of the disappeared

last days in the fuhrer bunker

(extracted from the memoirs of Fritz Vilhof second assistant file clerk at the Reichskanzlei)

The Fuhrer was becoming increasingly agitated as the tides of war turned against Germany. The glory days when he'd first sent the Pansies into Poland against the express wishes of Guderian and the Army General Staff who would have preferred to use tanks, seemed long past. Hitler had rightly guessed that the macho Poles were deeply insecure about their sexual orientation and would flee at the first sight of waves of effeminate looking men in lederhosen bursting through their borders. The General Staff never quite recovered their equilibrium on being wrong about such a matter. And the Fuhrer taunted them mercilessly about it at every opportunity. But by 1945 this was all in the dead past. We now knew that the Fuhrer's grip on reality was fading. He insisted on naming the winter offensive in the west against Patton's Third Army, Operation Snuggle Butt Tailies. Even the most optimistic among us felt that this was a bad sign. Von Runstedt threatened to resign over the name. He said the Allies would die laughing. Hitler just gave him a knowing wink and said: "Exactly." Von Runstedt did not like being winked at by a man but there was nothing he could do since it was the Fuhrer himself who had done it. Officers of the Wehrmacht often tried to keep themselves aloof from members of the Nazi Party and so they felt being winked at or being compelled to risk their lives in an attack called Operation Snuggle Butt Tailies, was a personal jibe at them. Nor did they like the Fuhrer's insistence on controlling every aspect of strategic planning. Heinrici was appalled by the famous March Twelfth Directive which instructed all Germans of whatever age group and gender to "just run at the British." Other Wehrmacht officers were similarly discommoded by the infamous "Say Boo And Drop An Anvil On Them," Order Of Battle with which they had been expected to repel the D Day landings. Many senior officers stopped coming to meetings at the Fuhrer Bunker and made excuses about being prevented from reaching Berlin by sudden RAF bombings or fuel shortages or not having anything to wear or headaches or needing to wash their hair. Relations between senior staff officers became strained particularly when Von Klug did a Sieg Heil and hit Goebbels in the eye. Von Klug claimed it was an accident but Goebbels was not so sure. Goebbels flinched every time he met Von Klug in the corridor for weeks afterwards. There had been hints of this sort of tension at the High Command for years. But it had not gotten so bad since perhaps the withdrawal against the Fuhrer's direct orders of Kampfgruppe Steinervortzel from the Kursk Salient in 43. In the Russian theatre there were to be many indicators that Hitler was no longer the master strategist. He had called one of our winter campaigns Operation Uranus and nobody knew for sure if he meant the planet or a bum. Himmler ever the opportunist, responded to each new name by cringing and saying: "That's an excellent name Mein Fuhrer." Many of us found his behaviour gauche in the extreme. Guderian also was increasingly alienated from the war effort after travelling overnight from Frankfurt by armoured train for a conference at the Fuhrer Bunker and being unable to get served any food on the train except soggy wienerschnitzel sandwiches. In March of 1945, the Fuhrer began pronouncing his English sentences correctly. He would say: "The cat sat on the mat," instead of the more usual: "Ze cat sat on ze mat," and "We are all doomed," instead of "Vee are all doomed," and so on. The final Russian attack on Berlin came as something of a relief to most of us in the end.

easter tide

A few years ago I was sitting in the darkness of Kilcullen church moments before the Easter celebration was due to begin.
I was thinking of the decision by my town to abandon the nuns of the Cross and Passion Convent into a lonely retirement in Dublin.
After more than a hundred years educating our sons and daughters we had dumped the nuns without a backward glance.
I sat there shaking my head.
You wouldn't do it to a dog.
My mind flew to an older history.
I remembered hearing about a shipwreck which had occurred in the nineteenth century.
Nuns from Germany were being exiled under a series of anti Catholic statutes known as the Falk Laws.
The ship carrying them sank in the English channel and they drowned.
I sat in Kilcullen church for some unaccountable reason thinking of those sisters.
Had they doubted God as they died?
Were their deaths miserable?
Weren't the German pseudo elites of 1875 probably less remiss in their honest hatred for Catholicism than my own countrymen are today for their sneaking snivelling acquiescence to a media cheer-led bigot war against the church?
Such were my thoughts.
Then the lights came on in the church.
The ceremony began.
Father Michael Murphy went into his sermon.
His first words were:
"Over a hundred years ago a ship called the Deutschland sank in the English channel. On board were five nuns, exiled from Germany under the Falk Laws."
His words stunned me.
Was his sermon a supernatural touch of God's providence?
Telepathy?
Coincidence?
Father Murphy continued.
"Witnesses recounted that the nuns refused to leave the ship. They stayed where they were in order to allow others to be evacuated. They are said to have prayed the rosary together as the ship went down."

interview with a health service manager

James Healy: You've had significant experience dealing with Alzheimers patients.

Health Service Manager: About forty years.

JH: Is there any hope we'll ever cure this?

HSM: It's incurable and I think it will always be incurable.

JH: Do you not think we might find a way...

HSM: Based on what I've seen I don't think we'll find a cure.

JH: You see no hope.

HSM: I don't want to say that.

JH: You see no hope of what I think will happen... that we will find a cure?

HSM: I see no hope of a cure. I don't think it's possible.

JH: In all your time running or managing this facility, have you noticed anything about the condition, anything that maybe others are missing?

HSM: What do you mean?

JH: Well I just think we should be talking to people like you. I think people like you who have worked with Alzheimers patients directly over a long period of time in a hands on way, will sometimes have seen something that perhaps more highly credentialled doctors and scientists are missing. I'm asking you have you noticed anything about your patients that may not be showing up in the clinical analyses.

HSM: Well the only thing I might say I've noticed... It's something I think I've seen... Well in a lot of cases it seems to me that the person has experienced a really sad event, something really... I mean really.... disruptive. And that they've never come to terms with it. I think I've noticed this in a lot of people. I'm not absolutely sure. But I think I have seen something like this in many cases.

JH: Anything else?

HSM: Well. I don't really want to say this either.

JH: Anything else that might be a common factor that the rest of us are overlooking. Anything at all.

HSM: I would hesitate to say it. But I think people who don't go on the medications tend to do a little bit better than those who do.

JH: Okay.

HSM: What makes you think it will be healed?

JH: Every question has an answer. I do think a healing will be possible. I've seen people recover their capacity to speak and respond while interacting with dogs. It seems to me that if the capacity is recoverable briefly, it may be recoverable more permanently. But I've suspected for years that we're looking for healings in the wrong place.

HSM: What do you mean by the wrong place?

JH: We've been looking for healings that specifically provide a profitable business model for pharmaceutical companies to prescribe drugs. We're rifling through the genetics and ignoring any linr of investigation that doesn't require a billion dollars to finance it. The healing, the solutions, the cures, in some instances may lie elsewhere and may come through different methodologies. For instance, in our capacity to love one another. In the effort we make to set up genuinely loving care facilities rather than inhuman institutions staffed by trade unionised psychopaths. Forgive me. The healing may come through the science of according dignity to the sufferer and learning to love him or her in spite of everything. Who knows what we'll notice if we take the time to genuinely care! That may be the duty we have. I gotta tell you. Maybe some of the rest of us supposedly well people become slightly less monstrous when we make the effort to love Alzheimers patients unconditionally. Maybe the light that can come from this is that selfish atheistic people will learn to love by helping others. The love will be where the cures are found. Even you Sister, taking time to notice a causality for Alzheimers that is not mentioned in the pharmaceutical and medical literature. That's a result of love. The according of dignity to the person may be a key to many locked doors. Doors that either well intended or cynically malicious scientists are trying to bludgeon open with narcotics. I'm suggesting we should be exploring the potentialities of love. For all of our sicknesses. It's a suspicion I've had for some time.