GPO

Dublin
1916

Letters being dropped
in postal slots
alongside Pearse proclaiming
the strength of the dead.

Plunkett's bangles clink
counterpoint to the patter
of anxious feet heading
for the street
and a bewildered cry of
Bejaysus, what have the
bastards done now?

Connolly baits and
De Valera calculates and
far away Yeats
begins a dream...

The Night Before • Tom Clarke

The fires of rebellion burn within his comrades; with him it is a white-hot furnace. Earlier in his life he returns from exile in the United States and joins an attempt to destroy London Bridge. Failing, he is sentenced by an Imperial court to imprisonment in England for as long as it pleases the representatives of the King. For most of the next fifteen years he is held in solitary confinement, subjected to extended periods of vile psychological and physical torture. When he is released, and returns to his homeland, he is determined to bring about a revolt that will settle matters once and for all. He loves his family beyond measure, but if he dies, so be it – he only fears failure and being returned to a cage.

The Night Before • James Connolly

He has devoted his life to the wage slaves: working stiffs, dirt dogs, navvies – all those without power serving the ones who hold it. It is not enough for him to force the Empire to leave; after they are gone he intends to bring down the indigenous ruling class and the economic system through which they have helped control the island before the Rising. He is as much a patriot as Pearse, but he is animated not nearly as much by God as by the inevitable triumph of socialism. He has lived in the United States, worked as an organiser there and knows how passionately many of its citizens have wished for a free Ireland. He hopes this will translate into material support, but he counts on nothing other than knowing there will be no more genteel arrangements with the Empire; the time to fight has come – the most dangerous battle in a life filled with them.

Poetic Observations • 7

Witness

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language


From The Rain in the Trees, 1988
W. S. Merwin

The Night Before • Padraic Pearse

He is much more fortunate than most. Born into a family that cherishes education and moral development, he graduates from university, a rarity for men of his generation on the island, and is called to the bar. A life of prosperity and comfort await him. Instead, the faith and compassion that guide him lead him to become an exceptional teacher and schoolmaster. Complete conviction and belief in the sacrifice of his life tell him he has been called by God to help free his country from the most powerful empire on Earth. He will be ruthless in helping trigger the Rising. When it apparently fails he has a vision of the triumph that will come from it and feels himself blessed beyond measure to nurture it with his blood.

A Passage to Freedom

"Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself."

Roger Casement
   Freedom fighter, revolutionary, abolitionist, poet

Knighted for his services to the colonial peoples within the British Empire.

Stripped of that knighthood and executed for High Treason by the British government for his participation in the Easter Rebellion, 1916.

A Vision

It is late January, 1958, and I’m standing on the top rung of the companionway ladder inside a hatch that opens into the cockpit of the schooner that is my home. She had been built fifty-five years before I was born, and is one of the very last 19th-century boats still capable of surviving the deepwater of the world. We are hundreds of miles from San Francisco and the west coast, headed toward the Marquesas Islands, having just endured a whole gale with winds approaching hurricane force. My father has been on deck for the better part of thirty-six hours, taking catnaps in a wooden chair lashed to ringbolts next to the cockpit, ever on the watch for the slightest mistake by whoever’s at the wheel and for any change in wind and water. I know he won’t make any mistakes. This perfect faith and the wonder of what I am seeing disallow the fear I might have had were I a bit older and capable of cynicism. My eyes tear a bit from the cold wind, still strong enough to keep the sheets taut even with the fores’l and mains’l reefed. My first brother stands next to me; unusually, we are not allowed on deck, so we make ourselves as comfortable as possible and look around us. It is morning. The sun is bright in a pale blue sky. High clouds driven by the wind scud across my vision. The horizon is clear and so distant no measure occurs to me. Surrounding us is an ocean without the boundary of land or even islands – nothing impedes its power as we ride swells towering over us one moment and the next lifting us high in the water and cold salty air, over and over until the motion is almost hypnotic – my brother and I raise and lower our heads in time to it, bringing a smile to the old man’s face. Once we noticed a albatross gliding across twenty-foot waves, their tops blown into spindrift. For hours I watch all this, my kid mind in a meditative state that I had learned when only a couple of years old by staring at bodies of water. And I was...moved...   emotionally in a manner that I could not articulate to anyone, not even to myself.

...

The memory remained, unfaded and unaltered by time or me. It didn't come to mind that often, and when it did it never occurred         to me to try and figure out what that elusive feeling was.                       Until a month ago, forty-eight years after the fact. I was riding my bicycle through my neighborhood, the streets safe enough that I could indulge in a bit of contemplation without worrying about being mown down by an SUV or delivery truck, when for no apparent reason the memory came to me, and I immediately understood what my ten year-old self had sensed. It was this:                                                                                

During that instant in my mortal life I had not only seen the primeval world, the world as it was before the coming of humans – I had been there.  

Politics as Disease

.         .         .
"The order of politics, as we have known it in the world, is an order imposed on society, neither desired by most people, nor directed to their needs. It is therefore chaotic and destructive. Politics grates       on our sensibilities. It violates the elementary requirement of aesthetics––– it is devoid of beauty. It is coercive, as if sound were forced into our ears at a decibel level such as to make us scream, and those responsible called this music. The 'order' of modern life is a cacophony which has made us almost deaf to the gentler sounds of the universe."
.         .         .

From The Art of Revolution
Howard Zinn