Hope

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 My friend Noirin posted this poem today on her FB site and it was so good I had to share it.

It's by the Irish poet and novelist Brendan Kennelly.
 Until 2005 he was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Now retired, he occasionally tours the USA as university lecturer.

(Reservoir Voices, 2009). 

Hope

Like lightning in dark skies
I love to brighten up dark lives
and rid sad hearts of lonely cries.
I have one fierce enemy, despair,
all driven energy, forever there,
rips hearts apart and doesn’t care.
I care. Let’s walk together now,
help me to help, to grow and thrive
and let the future shine alive.
Despair would murder it and make you
guilty. Let’s talk now as we walk and see
the future reaching out to you and me.
Our skies are brightening up today.
I love your company, dear friend,
and always will, come what may.
I dream of being the living song
everyone would love to sing.
Impossible? No. That’s me. Let’s keep walking
until both our hearts are singing.

Frederick Hart's Christ Rising Sculpture
and there's a wonderful post on it from Living Wittily Blog
Click here.

Image source

This extract below on Brendan Kennelly's work is is taken from an article from BloodAxe books website here

"Much of Brendan Kennelly’s poetry gives voice to others and otherness. Whether through masks or personae, dramatic monologues or riddles, his poems inhabit other lives, other beings and other ways of being in the world.

The riddling poems of Reservoir Voices add a further dimension to these explorations, inspired by an autumn sojourn in America where he would sit by the edge of a reservoir, trying to cope with loneliness by contemplating black swans, blue waves, seagulls, trees and rocks:

‘It was in that state of fascinated dislocation, of almost mesmerised emptiness, that the voices came with suggestions, images, memories, delights, horrors, rhythms, insights and calm, irrefutable insistence that it was they who were speaking, not me. To surrender to loneliness is to admit new presences, new voices into that abject emptiness. So I wrote down what I heard the voices say and, at moments, sing.’

‘With considerable honesty and bravery Kennelly enters and becomes others in order to perceive, understand and suffer…always moving, probing and doubting, never willing or able to settle on any one certainty…There is clash and conflict, cruelty and irony, sardonic wit, passion’ – Aidan Murphy, Sunday Press.

‘His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life’ – Sister Stanislaus Kennedy.

For a flavour of the man himself watch, this wonderful video of him at the iconic Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2009. 

He talks about his collection Reservoir Voices and reads four poems from it, including a great explanation of how the poem 'Hope' came to be written and also 'Lie', 'Proposal' and 'Peace', plus his classic 'Begin' from Familiar Strangers at the end. This is an excerpt from a film made by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Kennelly's reading at the Abbey Theatre in the Dublin Writers' Festival on 7 June 2009. 

NB ** Don't be put off by the inaudible opening part of this. The poor and faint sound quality improves, even though you may have to strain to hear it.

   
Brendan Kennelly: Reservoir Voices from Neil Astley on Vimeo.