History

RED CARPET, day 24 of A Month with Yeats

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I’m running behind on Jane Dougherty’s A Month with Yeats poetry challenge but better a tad tardy than a no-show. Yesterday’s inspirational quote was: ‘We know their dream; enough to know they dreamed and are dead; ‘ —W.B. Yeats ‘

My poem is called RED CARPET

 

We dream

of what can be,

not of what was, we

are here because of what

came before, what we will be

is based on what we believe,

on what we have learned

to be true. There are

footprints already

in place,

already paved,

a path already plotted

by the brave, those hung

by their own hope, those trampled

by the trust they held in the truth. We

walk this road, lined with lives lived

and lost in the fight for fairness,

freedom, friendship, fidelity.

To dream is a given, to

live out our truth is

the right that

was won by

the red

carpet of heroic blood beneath our feet.

 

All words and photography by Damien B. Donnelly

GPO, PAST POST, POETRY DAY IRL

/ deuxiemepeau / 9 Comments

 

A Poem about the GPO, Dublin’s iconic General Post Office

a site that’s seen more than just letters of love in its time…

for Poetry Day Ireland 27th April 2017

 

AnPostGPOwithbrassfittingsadded

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 by Damien B. Donnelly. Photograph borrowed from internet (I will give it back)

WHISPERS IN SETTLEMENTS

/ deuxiemepeau / 8 Comments

Day 19 National Poetry Writing Month #NaPoWriMo

We set our belongings
down in the settings
where others
once settled,
we sit at tables
and share meals
where others
once shared words,
maybe whispers,
maybe secrets,
maybe fears.
Can you see them;
smiling,
eating,
living,
dying
in quiet corners
we haven’t yet cluttered?

We set our hopes
down in places
others once
pondered
as potential.

Listen softly,
lived lives maybe
still listening,
still speaking
the wisdom
they once witnessed
before they became whispers.

We are houses,
we are homes
to those
whose shadows
we have settled
into.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Audio Version Available on SoundCloud:

 

THE LIGHT THAT SHIFTS THE SHADOW

/ deuxiemepeau / 9 Comments

Day 6: National Poetry Writing Month #NaPoWriMo

Trains used to slip
through these tracks
where runners now train,
old locomotives now relocated
like the light that displaces
the shadow,
but the lines
still linger,
less steam now,
more sweat
and sometimes
that light
that shifts
the shadow,
trains used to slip
through these tracks
that the city now tickles,
threatens with timeshares
to tear up what time still shares
in the corners where that shadow
leans into the light, on the lines where life
once rattled and raced,
before the new towers
knocked the old homes,
before the runners
and the walkways
and the boarders
and the builders
and the cranes
now shifting
into sight,
rising, in the distance,
just a step
beyond
that
light.

All Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken at la Petite Ceinture, an old paris railway line in the 15eme

LEFT OVERS

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screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-21-55-22

Soft skin, like silk, draws hands caress
in darkness as we warp and weft
our fragile frames in gyrating games,
crisscrossing lust with lies and trusting thighs,

ties.

We are bruised blankets baying
on beds of yesterday’s toils;
cotton soils and sweaty spoils.

Silk, like soft skin, slips from touch
too swiftly, too much sewn between seams
emblazoned with who we have become
and who we had before; I held his hand
in a taxi while thinking of another,

long departed.

We kiss alone but there is an orchestrated
orgy of others in every embrace, like a hunger
that cannot be abated, like a stain that cannot
be shifted from sheets we once saturated.

In the darkness, beneath the hands caress,
on silk, soft like skin, so supple, we slip
into gullible folds of flesh, not quite fresh,
trying to spell new names on withered frames
from those left over letters of old flames.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Audio version available on SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/left-overs

CURIOUS CORNERS

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Curiosity curated
around corners,
in passageways
of potted plants
and lingering light,
corners created
for the curious,
for passersby
to peep into privacy
in search of secrets
neath shadows and dust,
piggy banks with golden coins
and cans worthy of Warhol.

Dreams are dreamt
in little lanes
where light lingers
on broken benches
baring burdens of old,
curated into wood
and seeped into stone steps.

A passageway to
the past in Paris…

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photographs taken in the Passage de l’Ancre, Paris 2eme.

 

SUNSHINE AND SNOWFLAKES IN MONTMARTRE

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sunshine and snowflakes in montmartre

I climbed you today
in downpours
and falling snows,
no snow flake ever the same,
no foot step ever similar,
I climbed you today
in sunlight and stealing shadows,
in strokes of paint splattered in your memory
by artists as foreign as they are familiar,
I paused upon your steps,
your streets of steps,
the steep steps
others have taken,
others have trodden upon,
to take possession,
to take pictures,
to take part, to be a part
of all that once was
and has fallen to dust
through depression
and recession,
no sails blow no longer
to the winds wills,
the winds upon your hills
no longer home to the mills,
no more the spirits linger
green to the fairy’s touch,
spirits are in bottles now,
corked and capped
and cost too much
and the artists now
are but a shadow
of what once was,
shadows for sale
on the site of what once held cause,
on this martyred mountain
in Montmartre.
I climbed you today
in wind and rain,
the past and future present,
in a reverie of what can no longer be.
I climbed you and stood above you
and marked out the steps
I had taken along you,
along your lines and lanes
that lead me here, to this day,
to this moment, to this place
as this snowflake fell,
this unique particle
never to be repeated,
falling through time and space.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

 

 

OH COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 17.06.58

Oh country, my country,

once born in your troubled times
and raised by the banks where your Liffey lies,
I followed the paths of generations moved on
to see what they’d built, to see where they’d gone,
but returned to a home now seriously lacking
a nation of consumers complaining and attacking.
Where are your parishioners, the pride of your isle,
your Emerald’s glory once renowned for its smile?

Oh country, dear country,

now bigger than ever in girth if not majesty,
in greed if not glory, in makeup if not unity.
What has become of those simple smiles,
captured in bar songs of other times?
Is summer gone, have the flowers died
did Danny not return to his father’s side?
A nation once raised on songs and stories,
of people poor but proud of their glories.
Are you better beings in designer labels,
Gucci in hand and louboutin’s under tables?
Maleficent muttons playing innocent lambs
slaughtering histories with blood stained palms.

Oh country, once my country,

there’s no truth to your hunger or depth to your drunkenness,
no moral in your manners or reason for your forgetfulness.
Who’ll be your heroes in the years still to come,
who’ll hear your cries and who’ll beat your drum?
Collins was martyred and there’s no more de Valera
the last of your greats were the end of an era,
now it’s fools fickle to the latest fashion fads
tarted-up teenagers and under aged dads.

Oh country, fallen country,

once a force of marching freedom
while looking to other lands for asylum,
now turned and twisted into narrow opinions
while others seek help and die in their millions.
How has racism risen so loud
in a place once paraded as peaceful and proud,
where its people filled ships that sailed on the seas
in the hope that other lands would hear their pleas,
can you rise again from your Holy Ground
adding names to the list of your heroes renowned?

Oh country, lost country,

where Mary’s cries still ring out to the sea
for Michael who told her nothing matter’s when you’re free,
have you washed down too much of your own importance
and forgotten the fight for your own independence?
Can it be that the tiger, in departing, took your best;
your heart and your soul and just spat out the rest.

Oh country, what country,

how can I find my way back to before
when all I once loved has slipped from your shore?

IMG_5422

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken at across the fields at sunset in Lusk, Co. Dublin , Ireland

Paris- Within Me

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What is it about you that daily replaces you In front of my eyes

No matter how far from you I travel?

Were you the first one I saw from above

With your grey slates,

Smokeless chimneys

And laddering towers to the Gods?

Specs of gallant green

Among your columns and follies,

Your marching boulevards

Like lines of proud soldiers-

Brandishing the Tri-Color

For fear the memory of Marie Antoinette

May fall forsaken.

The whitened Sacred Heart

Upon your butted highest spot-

Where Saint Denis fell to martyrdom

Long before the painters-

Doused in Absinthe-

Captured the high-kicking,

Rouged-up damsels

Amid the Moulin’s endlessly turning sails.

Your very own Taj Mahal-

Not so in keeping

With your concrete corinthian cornices

And grotesquely glaring gargoyles

And yet so missed when no longer in view.

And there,

Standing as proud as your citizens,

By the far reaches

Of your once bohemian Left banks,

Where cheers of toasts were often heard

Amid the enlightened quarrels of Sartre,

In praise for the flat-shoed Stein

And sorrow for the almost exiled Wilde,

Lies your most celebrated folly of all;

Your monstrous clunk of iron-

Within who’s restaurant Maupassant

Would willingly dine to be excused

From the very view in which he sat,

Which melted itself into the heart of me.

More than a dozen times

Have I scaled your heights

To always draw a fresh breath of awe

Upon the sight from your summit,

Like the minute memory of the goldfish;

Immeasurably forgetful

But struck again and again

By the beauty of its surroundings

As if witnessed for the first time.

Your streets planned out before me

With cars racing onwards,

Inwards and through-

So much like the blood

Pumping through the entangled archeries

Of my beating heart.

I am a million miles from you again,

On top of the world of another city

And yet you are next to me

Wherever I stand,

In front of me

No matter what I see

And beating

Still so fresh and fervently

Deep down

Within me.

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