I was woken up at a very early hour this morning - it was still pitch dark but something told me it was somewhere between 4 and 6 am. I thought I was hearing things at first, but when I listened carefully there was no doubt - a cuckoo was doing his thing (going cu-cu cu-cu cu-cu) incessantly somewhere nearby. It was the first cuckoo of 2008, and judging by the unearthly hour of the morning, it must have been the mad cuckoo of Kilmaley who comes every year and cu-cus at the weirdest times. So for the record I heard the first cuckoo of 2008 before dawn on 23 April 2008 in Kilmaley.

He’s earlier this year than he was last year - I recorded my first cuckoo of 2007 on April 27th last year.

The launch of Revival no 7 was a great success, and a very enjoyable evening was had by all. Kevin Higgins who was on hand to do the launch, said a few words, and then treated all and sundry to an excellent reading of his work, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

As is the norm for Revival launches, poets represented in the publication who are present on the night are asked to read their poem. I read Lament which appears in Revival 7. View the launch slide show.

Afterwards, there was the weekly open mic which proved very lively and entertaining as lots of really good work was presented. A group of poets from the Listowel Writers Group were present and some of them read also. I took the opportunity to read Tricolour for the first time. I found it difficult as I didn’t have the poem properly committed to memory and ended up trying to read it from the page - always a problem for me. The result was I made a bit of a mess of it and the poem didn’t flow like it should. I also felt uncomfortable while reading it and upon reflection I realized that this was because I hadn’t properly contextualized it. This I did the next day (10 April), by adding an appropriate excerpt from The Proclamation of The Irish Republic to the beginning. At last Sunday’s monthly meeting of the Three-Legged Stool Poets in Ennis, I read the updated version and am pleased to confirm that the poem is indeed finished. I have now amended the poem which I published in a previous posting.

I’m looking forward to tonight’s launch of Revival no. 7 at the White House Poetry event in the White House Pub on O’Connell St., Limerick at 9pm (get there early as it will be crowded the way these launches always are), not least because I have a poem in Revival 7 entitled Lament and will get to read it for the first time in public.

The evening apparently kicks off with a reading by guest poet, Kevin Higgins. This will be followed by the official launch of Revival 7. Finally, the open mic session will take place, the MC for the night being John Johnston. I’m hoping to give my latest completed poem, Tricolour (published here in a previous post), its first ever public airing also.

Some famous poet, whose name escapes me, once wrote that a poem is not complete until such time as it becomes public. I very much identify with this, as the act of reading to an audience is the equivalent of severing the umbilical chord, when the poem comes into its own as an independent entity. The audience serves as midwife to the completion of the poem’s birthing process as it were. Only then can I judge whether a poem has real merit: I may feel in my bones that it has but I can never be sure until I experience my own delivery of the poem to the audience and feel their reaction to it.

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Issue no. 7 of Revival is being launched at the White House this coming Wednesday 9th April 2008. As I have a poem in it - Lament - I’ll be going to read it on the night.

There is also a guest poet from Galway - Kevin Higgins.

TRICOLOUR

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally…”

[Excerpt from The Proclamation of the Irish Republic read out by P.H. Pearse at noon on Monday 24 April 1916 on the steps of the GPO, Dublin, the tricolour having just been raised]

~~~

Green is for gangrene
that eats up all the heroes
whose deaths went unseen

White’s for their faces
from the shock they’d receive
were they to return

Gold’s for the lucre
twenty million fold thirty
pieces of silver

***

Green’s for the gombeens
who sell out their own people
not paying their taxes

White’s their amnesia
when asked to explain where
all the cash came from

Yellow the public
who vote in these criminals
and show them respect

***

Green are the gobshites
who honour these criminals
and lap up their lies

White for surrender:
truth and fairness replaced with
greed, ugliness, spite

Gold is for Mammon
god of builders and bankers
and knaves in the Dail

***

Green was the landscape
now blighted with motorways
speeding to nowhere

White’s for the death throes
of culture and heritage
bulldozed and buried

Orange vested men
toil for the vested interests
of millionaire thieves

***

Green the Republic
that betrays its ideals for
the good of the few

White’s for its failure
to nurture all its children
in justice and love

Yellow the bishops
hiding paedophile curates
and priests from the law

***

Green’s for the struggle
against tyranny and hate
so the story goes

White its purity?
Social justice me bollix -
it’s jobs for the boys!

Yellow the cowards
who plant bombs killing children -
some fucking heroes!

***

Orange the bigots
who refuse to accept that
they started the war.

~~~

10 April 2008
on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

Tricolor by Patrick Stack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.amethystdragonarchives.org.