Hospice Coffee Morning, Green, Ballybunion and Oneday in St. Johns'

On Culture Night, Sept 20 2019, Listowel Writers' Week had a novel ideas. We distributed poems on cards to passers by.

One of the poems was called Green by John McAuliffe and it was a brilliant poem about a golf lesson in Ballybunion. The golfer was as green as the fairway and finding the green was the task in hand.

Green

There's the flag. Now,

have you a line?

Don't look up. Head 

down. Pine cone, broom,

the tee, the rough, wind,

the grip, the lesson,

Cliff House, no-one's beach,

Nuns' Beach.

Loop Head, concentrate,

or it could go anywhere,

Titleist, the pockmarked moon,

The Bunker, the Leithreas,

the seaweed bath, the transmitter,

the Hotel, asylum -seekers,

the castle, the slots, last

and not to be found,

the Tinteán, the house built on sand,

and closer to the tee,

remember the line,

the graveyard, forget

the westerlies,

the playground, the pool,

presidential bronze, grooved steel,

the straight long undulating road,

America level, God above,

the Atlantic, the Atlantic,

and the verge where  I live,

planting my feet squarely.

Now, swing.

Follow through.

Try again.

With all the distraction I think that lesson may not have gone well.

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Ladies Day 2019

Here are a few more images from the Island on the Friday of Raceweek 2019

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Kerry Hospice Coffee Morning

There was a great attendance at the fundraising coffee morning in The Listowel Arms on Thursday Sept 19 2019. The sunshine made taking photographs a bit difficult but I'm not complaining.

(more tomorrow)

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Oneday, Today, Any day

I went to see this unusual play in St. John's on Thursday last. It was very thought provoking. The play was about stories from the newspapers on a specific day, March 13 2012.

As I watched Shane Connolly's energetic, energy sapping performance, contrasted with Richard Walsh's relaxed casual director on stage role, I was struck by the similarity to today's news.

Occupy were sitting in in Galway in 2012. Seven years on the farmers were camped at the gates of the meat plants and students were marching in an effort to alert us to the reality of climate change.   Huge salaries paid to TV hosts are again making news and outraging people. Civil wars are raging everywhere, politics and money dominate news in the US, in Ireland people are losing their homes, people are being murdered by strangers they meet online and on the day I was at the play a horrific accidental murder had happened as a man in a remote rural area was driven to violence by the fear of a thief in the night. All of this mirrors what was happening on one day in 2012.  And then there is the universal truth that everywhere people are driven to madness by the trauma of war or by fanaticism for sport.

"Young Willie McBride, it all happened again, and again, and again and again and again,"

This is a three man show, all three onstage at all times. The space is dominated by the performer and when he is quiet while the director calmly tells  a story, we are constantly aware that he is hovering in the background ready to spring into life to animate another news story. All the time the percussionist is marking time, heightening and lowering the tempo as the news stories unfold.

If you missed it in Listowel and you see that it on somewhere, go.

Máire Logue, artistic director, St. John's, Richard Walsh, writer director Oneday, Joe Murphy, former artistic director of St. John's and me, Mary Cogan.

Richard Walsh with me and his parents, Eily and Johnny

The ensemble relaxing over a pint in Christy's at the  after show party.