Dublin

UP IN DUBLIN, LITERARY GHOSTS

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The door from 7 Ecceles street which Joyce made into a home for Leopold Bloom in his novel Ulysses 

Haiku poetry based on Ulysses 

James Joyce

Sweny Druggist in Dublin, featured in the novel Ulysses

Exterior of Blooms Hotel, Dublin 

The Dublin Writers Museum 

Beckett, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Behan, Yeats, Kavanagh, O’Brien…

Samuel Beckett

Bram Stoker 

Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square

WB Yeats exhibition in The National Library 

Yeats’ love and muse who rejected him for the wild streets of the rebellion, Maud Gonne

Lady Gregory, co-founder of The Abbey Theatre with Yeats

No Second Troy, Yeats and his poem for Maud

All photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

A DEER BY A DOLMAN IN DUBLIN for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This years theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

A Deer by a Dolman in Dublin

Where you there, all the time, I asked myself,
for I have not discovered the powers of hindsight,
as our words wove like the wind around the whispers
the woods were once witness to?

Where you there all the time, I asked myself,
in that soft spot of spirit in the fold of our minds?

I had whispered, along the way, as feet caressed
the crumbling clay, as a heart trembled in a throat
that tried not to tumble through words,
I had wished for a grace to ground us like that curve
of concrete on the caress of the mound that grounded
what had once grown tired into the ground.

You were there, all the time, I told myself,
as I caught the river as it cast reflections
of trees rising up and roots growing down
and I realised we are not just man,
we are not just the mound we lay beneath.
We are inseparable, like these reflections
sinking into the stream, we are not one,
but the other, not beast or beauty, but both,
finding our way along the water to a bed to call comfort.

You were there, all the time, a dear Deer, by a dolman,
in Dublin, listening to our songs of the living
and the loving and the dreaming and the dying

laying our poems on paths already pressed
while the deer stood and wondered who would come next?

   

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly

GPO for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This year’s theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

General Post Office

1
Beneath the pillars
of your past,
I posted letters
between your walls
and wondered
if they rubbed up against
the souls of your saviours,
if they met with memories
that were made and measured,
bruised and battered
between your bricks and mortar
before being buried in blood.

2
How many letters of love
lined in lust and longing
have perfumed your pillars,
working their way
through your worthy walls
and haunted halls
in search of hungry hearts
to hold them, to open them,
to hear them.

   

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly

ATOMS

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You there, yes, you,
checking out your hairdo
with your books begging to the opened
or your totes from Thomas’
cutting across this triskeled campus,
teacher or seeker or refugee looking for a rest
along the rocky road of resistance,
stand still for a moment and see beyond yourself,
your day, your demands, beyond all these fleeting reflections,
stand here, in the stillness of our spinning space
and see Einstein’s apple orbiting all that has now become known as Nobel,
in the almost saturated silence listen out to the whispers
that first became wit and then became wonder,
that gave Walton reasons to ponder.
See multiples of yourselves
in these spheres as singular blocks
building on our ability to be better beings,
to give more meaning to all this matter, here,
in these courtyards of conversations
housing halls now held in high esteem.
Can you see, within these curves of light leaning,
along these lines of longitude cutting through latitudes,
the circles through which we navigate,
the atoms, the Adams, the objects,
the Eves, the masses pushing outwards,
the energy pressing inwards, the people passing on.
Stop, for a moment and release all that you were
and make a place for all that you will become.

The atoms came first and then we bit into the apple.
I wonder if it made us any brighter, lighter?
When you look into these globes, do you see a reflection
of all our energy or is it a projection of what is still to come?

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken from the internet of Apples and Atoms, a sculpture by Eilís O’Connell at Trinity College, Dublin, commemorating Ernest T S Walton (1903-95), physicist and Nobel laureate and the first person in history to artificially split the atom.