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Monday, April 13, 2026

Home - A Poem that Somehow did Not make it onto a Poetry Ireland Poster on the Theme of Home...!





Home

 

 

 

A place that is all the more unrecognisable now

 And where poor migrants arrive in the middle of the night

Deposited outside former hotels and country manors

Outnumbering certain townsfolk that wake up uncomfortably to them.

 

A place where the streets of the capital are littered

With tents of the homeless set up outside government buildings

And where the guards police with their hands in their pockets

When they are nor being called out by the government to arrest peaceful protesters

 

Who are merely trying to assert their most basic human rights.

Home, a place where the leaders are now spoken of as "Elites"

As they are now so mistrusted for once elected they are merely full of deceit.

 

Home, a place which I don’t recognise any more

Where everyone’s a poet, being equal and all,

But somehow I don’t  buy any of it.   





https://www.poetryireland.ie/poetry-day-ireland/discover-poetry/poetry-day-ireland-2026-poster-poems?mc_cid=d44ed2ecde&mc_eid=dd01598669





 

Sunday, April 12, 2026

Baudelaire on Romanticism






                                                    The Setting of the Romantic Sun

 

 

 

Isn’t the Sun beautiful when everything freshly awakes,

Like a silent implosion exploding in greeting !

And so Happily then are they who with love

Can bid its departure daily, as in a dream !

 

I remember!... I saw everything, flower, source and furrow,

Fainting beneath the eye like a heart which is palpitating…

-        Run towards the horizon, it is late, run quickly,

To catch at least an oblique ray of light!

 

But I pursued the God in vain which was retiring;

Irresistible night was now establishing its empire,

Dark, humid and funerary and full of trembling;

 

An odour of the tomb and of darkness reigned,

And my heavy feet trod on the edge of the swamp

That was peppered with unforeseen toads, mollusc cold.





 

Monday, April 6, 2026

The Persians - an extract- after Aeschylus

 



                                                                           


Chorus :  Lord Donald, teeming West’s would be Master,

                Now trumpets daily his X

                With his Psychopathic Minister of War

                 Whose generals systematically retire,

                  The confidence in their government

                  Unlike the price of gold, plummets

                  Inwardly and as swiftly as a doomed

                 And as expensive as an F 35,

                Un-dazzlingly and as ungodlike

                With Hamster like eyes and candy child

                Looks, all Sugar-Daddied and Epstein

                Stained, calcified in dental horror;

                A laundry list of sailor’s complaints

                Stoking fuel fumes in the Persian Gulf,

                No longer hurtling chariots nor rocket fires

                Of famed Washington, but announcing laundering

                Issues and toiletries before docking in fair Cypress

                While Ares, the real God of War,

                Bulleting all foes to Hell and back,

                And a strait of men in white jackets

                Who’ll face them down?

                With what weapons, and with what tele-screen

                 And battle cries; can they open the Sea?

                Meanwhile Persia’s army – the Persians !

                The unstoppable Persians!.....