BACK FROM DUBLIN!

IN THE GALWAY HOOKER BAR

(Heuston Rail Station, Dublin)

I’m back in the Galway Hooker,

heading out to the west

and, as usual, it’s teeming

with the scheming 

pond life of Dublin:

the newts

and wits

who twinkle 

in this bowl 

of moving humanity,

at swim

in sunlight,

slumped

in a beaten economics

and those boom days 

that are past.

And Jimmy Joyce and his literary travellers

leer at us from a corner 

of streaming consciousness

and bad girls’ skirts

drift upwards

in an afternoon 

with miles ahead

and the promise

of a kiss 

of Irish Coffee.

I’m crawling

today along

this beaten track to Limerick,

the chance occurrence

of a poetry event,

the opportunity for fickle friends

to catch my dreams

in inquisitive ears

and despatch 

my skimming words

to the gutters of shot memories.

‘By God she’s a looker,

that one on the stool,

making an awful fool

of  a lad in the Hooker.’

‘Her legs go the whole way,

her terrible sin,

she sings

from here to Galway.’

And then The Boys from Tipperary 

they’re here

in a clump of blazers and ties

and every one has a lass

on his hurling arm

and a pint of Guinness in his face.

We envy them

their youth and not their sense,

we wise old men of Heuston

who’ve seen the heroes come and go,

heard the guns ring out

across the Station

and learnt 

to savour

the slaughter

in our glasses.

But now friends 

we must be 

heading off 

to the dawn

and hope 

that these trains 

we leave behind

can find their way

to that which our history 

sheds.

So remember

Sean Heuston,

the railway clerk,

a crucifix he kissed

and the freedom he died for,

every drink

that you down 

in the Hooker. 

KEITH ARMSTRONG

The Galway Hooker is a traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland. The hooker was developed for the strong seas there. Its sail plan consists of a single mast with a main sail and two foresails. Traditionally, the boat is black (being coated in pitch) and the sails are a dark red-brown.

THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814) - THE HIVE OF LIBERTY

(AFTER THE NAME OF THOMAS SPENCE’S BOOKSHOP AT 8 LITTLE TURNSTILE, HIGH HOLBORN)

I am a small and humble man,

my body frail and broken.

I strive to do the best I can.

I spend my life on tokens.

I traipse through Holborn all alone,

hawking crazy notions.

I am the lonely people’s friend.

I live on schemes and potions.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

I am a teeming worker bee.

My dignity is working.

My restless thoughts swell like the sea.

My fantasies I’m stoking.

There is a rebel inside me,

a sting about to strike.

I hawk my works around the street.

I put the world to rights.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Thomas Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750. Spence was the leading English revolutionary of his day, with an unbudgeable commitment to individual and press freedom and the common ownership of the land.

His tracts, such as The Rights of Man (Spence was, perhaps, the first to use the phrase) and The Rights of Infants, along with his utopian visions of 'Crusonia' and 'Spensonia', were the most far-reaching radical statements of the period. Spence was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814. 

THE BREAKING WHEEL

I follow your blog. And I liked very much your article THE BREAKING WHEEL. I´m Rosa Ulpiano from Spain. And I´m art critic. Nice to meet you.

This is the place of torture.

Life is not easy.

Look at your own face,

it is lined with the worries

of those long flown away;

their lives,

for what they’re worth,

lie stretched across history,

stinking of injustice.

This is more agony

than smiles.

Sip your coffee

and think

of those who died making it.

Soak up the warmth of the sunshine

in this carcass of a town

for we are just fleeting meat

on the Catherine Wheel of centuries,

simply dust

on the sheen of the river.

That man walking

across the marketplace

looks kind

but underneath it all

he is a murderer of insects,

an officer

who’ll break you on the cross

with his sturdy provincial mallet.

It’s a race of rats

scurrying past the Stiftskirche window

in a frenzy stripped of meaning.

Do not trust a judge,

he will crush you

to save his own wig and skin.

The Law is an ass

and lawyers are donkeys

in fancy gowns,

feasting on slaughter

and leering

among the carnival crowds.

And don’t even think

of trusting a crow,

it will feed on your pathetic verse

and hockle out the crumbs of words

into the Lange Gasse gutter.

Can you even board a plane

without thinking of the dead on battlefields?

Can you sit in an airport lounge

without seeing the severed limbs

strewn around you?

Is that a swastika logo

in McDonalds?

Helmut Herzfeld eat your heart out

for they are still

going about their duties,

breaking spirits with missiles,

hammering the humanity

from loving communities.

Let me show you

the hillside

where they displayed the broken body

for the world to scoff at.

Let me remind me you

how cruel the bastards are,

how ugly that Nazi is at the bar.

You know we are fragile,

passing butterflies

in the appalling rush hour

of the dying day.

Please please cling to me,

cling on to the immense value of your own dark dreams;

instead of a simple carnage,

think of your complicated beauty.

That way it wil be easier

to walk along Wilhelmstrasse

in the flowing rain,

to love a girl called Catherine

for her caring spirit

and a refuge seeker

for his marvellous poems.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

The breaking wheel, or Catherine Wheel, was a torture device used for capital punishment in the Middle Ages and early modern times for public execution by cudgelling to death.

It was a crude implement of torture reserved for commoners who had killed their families, committed murder during the course of theft, betrayed their lords, or otherwise outraged the community with excessive crimes. The condemned prisoner was lashed to a large stout wagon wheel and an executioner broke all of the prisoner’s limbs and joints with a cudgel or metal bar. The broken limbs were secured to (or threaded through) the spokes of the wheel and the prisoner was hoisted into the sky on top of a pole to contend with dehydration and the birds.

In a window on the north east side of the Stiftskirche in Tuebingen

(today the Protestant Collegiate Church and, before that, the Catholic Church of St. George) is the carved stone image of a man on a breaking wheel.

Legend says that two journeymen went on tour in the woods near Tuebingen, but only one came back. As he had a dagger with him that the other man had once received as a gift, he was thought to have murdered his missing companion and the Duke of Wuerttemberg had him broken on the wheel. When the other man turned up alive and healthy a week later, the Duke was directed to do penance by paying for a window to commemorate the martyrdom of St. George, which also took place on the wheel.

The window was used by the exiled German printmaker and photomontage artist John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld) in 1934 as a template for one of his political photo collages - "As in the Middle Ages ... so in the Third Reich" - against the Nazi regime.

Heartfield (1891-1968) is now regarded as the inventor of political photomontage.

He skillfully adapted the swastika (itself an image adopted and misused by the Nazis) to picture what was happening to the German people under the guidance’ of Adolf Hitler and his cronies. Some might say that this image of suffering is a little generous to the German people, portraying them as the victims of Nazism, but once Hitler had secured absolute power for himself and with no way of democratically – or governmentally - relieving him of his position then victims is exactly what they were.

Heartfield employed the actor Erwin Geschonneck as a model and instructed him to writhe naked in various poses around a specially made wooden cross.

On the finished glued two-part assembly, you look down on the wheel and also see a man, as in the church window, depicted as a martyr to the swastika.

Dear Keith, your poem is a very beautiful one, we thank you very much for it. And we sent it to some of our friends! Yours Heidi and Wolfgang