Judith Quaempts

Beyond This Point Lie Demons

The rush of noon begins.
You are between 19th and M,
hurrying to the Greek take-out for lunch.
How could you know the man would choose
that moment to come from the alley?
Dressed in rags, hands grabbing air,
he heads for you.

Passers-by keep walking,
pretending not to see, and you,
your knees shaking,
will yourself forward,
praying he’ll let you by.
But then an urge just takes you.
You look – really look – at him.
What you see punches a hole through your heart.
Without realizing, you reach out.

You aren’t prepared for his reaction.

“No, Momma, No!” he screams, as though
you just burned him and backs away,
leaving your eyes to follow.
You try not to see the cardboard box,
try not to breathe the garbage nearby,
try not to see how he sways,
how dazed his eyes are,
and think of that slaughterhouse steer
you saw on TV, beaten and shocked
when it couldn’t stand up.

His eyes… why can’t you let go of his eyes?

One week later you pass that way again.
You risk a look; see nothing but a flattened box.
Ventilator shafts climb past blank windows,
and twelve stories up, an indifferent sky
looks back at you.

Good Catholic Girl – Circa 1950

Moira O’Shea.
Bless her heart.
Ten children,
a husband who beats her.
A loud-mouthed bantam man
a pain-in-the-arse drunk
who turns her skin blue
every weekend.

‘T’is your burden
to bear, Moira dear’
her priest says,
‘Offer it up to Him
Who died for your sins.’

At times she thinks
with a guilty twinge
that HE had only one bad day
while hers run into the hundreds.

But Moira O’Shea
doesn’t complain.
She’s a good Catholic girl
brought up to obey.

Besides, who’d take her in,
poor Moira O’Shea, her
with all them mouths to feed?

Teaching Demons to Sing

On a sunless morning
too warm for December
he paces, mumbling.

Huddled on a secondhand couch
his wife and children
wait for what’s coming.

His hands clench, unclench,
flex and flurry. Words…
stupid bitch…good for nothing…

and the children so quiet,
the woman barely breathing,
her shoulders hunched,

fingers twisting.
On a sunless morning
too warm for December

he picks up a gun
and the waiting is over.

John Quicke

Keller in Hollywood

In 1918 Helen Keller accepted an offer to make a film of her life at the Brunton Studio, Hollywood.
“The unconscious cruelty of our commercial society” – Helen Keller

On the set, the appearance
of naturalness for her unnatural.
A flushed director tapped and spelled
in her hand. Her childhood in the can,
after that the legend – encounters
with the greats like Twain and Bell,
then draped on rocks yearning absurdly
for Odysseus who burnt out
the Cyclops’ eye, then wrestling
with dark Ignorance.

She’d agreed the title,
Deliverance, of the torn world
from its agony, but not the eclipse
of politics by myth and romance,
not her robing as the Mother of Sorrows
so “grace” would rub off on the masses
as she walked amongst them,
the extras throat and nostrils sprayed
to ward off ’flu, while they acted
crazy with religious fervour.

The reviews were good.
Hacks noted “strong men moved to tears,
children spellbound, mothers torn
with emotion” on reading sub-titles
“Thanks wizard teacher. I’m not dumb now.”
But on the first night there’d been a row
– a full house in the rain
at the strike bound theatre and not a sign
of her or teacher, who were acting
in solidarity with Equity.

And in the aftermath, questions, gossip.
Papers dug up ‘facts.’
A sexual life forbidden by her mother,
the dark barrier between them;
a teacher with a chequered history,
who refused to judge her fellow inmates
in the almshouse, their fears of fondlings,
resort to blades, threats to slice flesh
even as they still seemed desperately
to need male bodies;

a teacher, apparently, with an oddball
husband, a radical who prompted people
with the pen, and loved to discuss
his works at length with Helen
who was said to be “confused
and led astray” but whose nerve
outlasted his. Strong enough
in her own agency to take on the charities,
rich sponsors, business links,
their attempts to dumb her down;

and to support the Wobblies,
Lenin and the socialist cause,
her books thrown on Nazi bonfires,
a file opened by the FBI,
so she was forced to hide her red light
under a bushel. Too saintly to be called
un-American, too ‘commie’ to be uncensored,
nothing could divert her from her message
that blindness was the bitter harvest
of infidelity, the main cause: cruel commerce.

The Camel Jockey

I met him wandering on the dunes, a tiny man
who’d been replaced by an automaton.
“ Remember those rows of gantry cranes, high
stacked decks, lines of waiting wheels? No more!”
He’d seen containers with their cargoes spilled,
flowers for ‘cities’, umbilicals cut, withering;
noted rebellion afoot amongst the worker tribes
crawling from their barracks to mix wrong ratios
of sand/cement before their deportation.
Soon the mighty towers crumbled, icons fell like
ninepins, while on the three glass pyramids left,
the Sheikh’s smiling face, appeared, disappeared,
proclaiming his benevolence, his eternity,
his concern for customer care.

Spin

Outside the outer edge of wilderness,
firing arguments from mountain tops of sand…
I see your denial of a sense of burn out.
Perhaps, a change of view? Cherish the rosy glow
that’s solitude, a quiet space for a slow take off,
for consolidation of a found again dream?
I’ll help you perform a version of your ‘true’ self,
as the perfect antidote to clubman economics,
newly minted but slightly ragged and unpolished.
So let your handlers deal with the baggage,
put yourself on a well resourced plane, and re-enter
not as an aging comeback kid, but as ‘real’,
all your hyperboles tied down, all your conceit
lurking in the eyes airbrushed, all your friends
and family now on message. It’s OK
to rely on me to put your best foot forward.

Jazz at the Alcazar

Our guide talks of minds concentrated by the rhythmic radiance
of flowery repetitions, interlacing geometric shapes,
ribbons of Qur’anic inscriptions joined to proclaim oneness.

I’m out of it for a smoke, earphones ablaze with Ornette Coleman,
once accused of ‘standing on the throat of jazz,
casting aside chords and reaching for improvisational anarchy.’

Back under starlit ceilings, there’s more about homage to refined
abstraction but now the tonal and the atonal jar
in conflicting adjacent worlds. To build bridges does hope

lie in a jam between two minimal mathematicals? Would Messengers,
Art Blakey and muslim converts, smoky sinners as cool zealots,
be heading up four rivers of paradise to restful pavilions?

Sand

You may need to crawl here,
keep your head down,
send in the armoured men with wands,
to break the spell of daisy chains in the sand,
as gritty under foot as on the beach
where you once built a fragile fort
bent down like gods
to fix it with decorative shells
the walls soon tumbling in the wash
of creeping waters. Now, approach with care
the hidden links. This is their land,
and you the dog-tagged interlopers
working your way with sweat
dripping in heavy vests.

Above Beauchief Abbey

To find this, here, above the Abbey,
a buried box, antenna rusty but intact,
behind a nettle screen, locked in by hawthorn,

its concrete outcrops painted one coat white,
the vents and entrance blocked, is to stumble
upon an old fear, to shiver at the thought

– a ‘warning sequence’, identification
and assessment, the blast, height and angle
of the flash, the zone, the measurement of fallout;

then to emerge after the all clear, to stare
across the flaming meadow, across the last
joke of the ha ha, the fallen Hall and its estate,

the spread of lethal snow on fairways, towards
the Abbey finally dissolved. And though
this fear has passed is there still sense enough

to heed what might be other warning signs
– self-scourging in the chapter-house, yellow
fever death reminder on a gravestone,

Hall logo for electronic data processing,
chemical treatments on fine cut grass near
wind-smacked conifers, and to the north,

hoots for the tunnel, preparation for dark moments,
last sight of the light on the river, the absence
of echo amongst thin oaks in steep woods?

The Citadel

In red lavatorial brick with the buddleia sprouting
from the turrets and a basement full of pigeon bones…
is that the retail opp, you said, think coffee shop?
Will you then distress me with your sepia photos,
‘before-and-after restoration display’, ‘retained features’
– like tiers of the old theatrical space in ‘original colours,’
sage green, maroon, yellow, red and blue in walls
and pillars; the mosaic floor; the dado…..
What else? Cymbals, tambourines, blurts
from trumpets on a disc?

But what of the derelict days, and its last use
– the babies of the faithful in their own ‘cry room’
with a battered wall with ‘WALL’ written on it vertically
and on the horizontal WE ALL LOVE THE LORD?
And what they saw from windows – the banners of a troop
of ‘others’ sporting head scarves, pink, black and blue,
claiming ‘Terrorism is Not Religion’and, further down,
a fleet of marriages with brides stretched out in Limos,
and in Waterstones a hooded man thumbing through
a book on euthanasia?

You, me – we go back a way, to the last trump,
you might say, of the unlaudable hyperboles.
We now have different doubts in different bands
– you worry if fumbling for the right note in an age
of dissonance would sour a good coffee experience;
I think of the sharps and flats, the blues and blacks
of working on an unfinished song of songs.
From either view it was not their banging
of the drum which gave us this heaven sent
‘opportunity for development’.

Mike Quille

People

People, we come from out of the mud
Made by our nature, our sweat and our blood
Wanting to work for the common good.

Together we stand, divided we fall
People, we hear our history call
For justice and freedom, a fair life for all.

For Capital exploits, and Power tells lies
The poor are ground down while the rich pass them by
People, support us, and Occupy.

Occupy the Churches
Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread

People, we come from out of God’s mud
Made by our nature, our sweat and our blood
Wanting to work for the common good.

Together we stand and divided we fall
People, your sisters and brothers call
For the love of Jesus, justice for all.

For Capital exploits us, and Church tells us lies
We are being ground down, and the rich pass us by
People, support us, and Occupy.

I Am Chavez

I am Chavez
I am the Indian with the chicken and the maize
Cheap food for everyone

I am Chavez
I am the clerk in the Caracas office
Nationalise the banks

I am Chavez
I build houses in San Cristobal
Expropriate the landlords

I am Chavez
I am the doctor in the Bolivar Clinic
Hands off the NHS

I am Chavez
I am the soldier who fought for the people
End the Afghan war

I am Chavez
I teach religion in the new village school
Jesus was a communist

I am Castro

Terence Quinn

New Model Poetry

There will be a turning point,
a time when the forlorn hope
of a poem’s first line
dies in the glazed eyes
of a people tired of reading
of this war without an enemy.

There will be a time
when all seems lost
poets deserting and drifting home,
a time for action,
for acts by action passed,
our self-denying ordinance.

There will be a new model poetry
that knows what it writes for
each word advanced on merit
each verse a body
that refuses to be subjected
to this state of introspection.

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