Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Special Edition September 2021

P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G

Limited Edition published September 2021

Lives on the Line curated by

Eileen Casey Front Cover Image: Washing Hands by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

LIVE ENCOUNTERS SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION SEPTEMBER 2021

Supported by South Dublin Social Inclusion (Connecting Community through the Arts) It takes a village to raise a child but it only takes a tiny sentence to start an avalanche.

©Eileen Casey

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

Eileen Casey Lives on the Line Morning is so faithful, it comes back to us after being away all night.

Such certainty can be hard to bear; we sleep, we rise. Breathe. Fall into rhythms.

Then the faithful of the ordinary alters.

Most of what’s taken for granted no longer familiar.

Someone is absent from the line-up.

A face in a photograph, back row perhaps.

Smiled or waved or nodded to.

Seen on a regular basis (not enough to know any personal details) yet part of the fabric of existence.

Front row, a different matter.

Lives intersecting with our own; lives that keep our world in motion.

Too much to bear when they go.

Absences deep and complex as silence.

Not to have them leave us crushed.

We mourn settings too. Conversational landscapes. Places we go to hear voices.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Vibrant voices in a hive of life.

Blood courses through veins, eyes brighten.

Places we’ve loved become a distant memory dim in the alcove of jaded imagination.

Where have all the colours gone? Forgotten geography, like a sky no longer visible to the caged bird.

The spark that was once a flame of enthusiasm, joy and hope now dulled and dimmed, casting dark shadows, filling my heart with a strange kind of ache, loneliness, emptiness, loss of freedom, loss of control. How I long for the day, how I long for the place, for only people can fill this space.

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How easy such sparks extinguish.

Even a ferocious blaze burns out.

Beacons thicken into midnight shapes.

We long for ‘presence’. Senses dull.

Perspective changes. The news if not bad, is also not good. The world locks down.

A prized possession under lock and key.

Streets bare, eerie. Every day is a Sunday.

It’s not as if the world hasn’t known plague before.

Bubonic. Tuberculosis. Chicken Pox. Marco Polo observed waiters serving the Great Khan, wearing silk facemasks.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

Morning is so faithful, it comes back to us after being away all night.

Can anything be certain in an uncertain world?

Yet, people sing across distances of apartment block balconies. Arias for breakfast. Puccini’s Nessun Dorma. Hands reach out over divides.

And, while no-one is touching, virtual physical contact thrives.

This is a world where a hug is no longer a reflex.

With arms outstretched you come towards me, smiling. “No, you can’t hug Nana, you must stand back.”

In the beginning, we make great bravado, transform virtual hugging into a game, good humoured Marcel Marceau mime.

Touching elbow bone to elbow bone.

Hands and fingers, knees and toes, songs sung to children learning to read small, soft bodies.

Yet, this is a new dance friendship choreographed.

Virtual mating dance for lovers, virtual hugs in a virtual reality. Screens fills up.

Child innocence. Adult experience.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Hand to screen, like prison visiting day, we mouth the words “I love you,” pressing hands against glass. Hand to screen to hand. A relay of words, action but no touch.

Our words are often silent. Pressed flowers.

All those juices squeezed out.

We try to preserve emotion. Words spoken puts too much flesh on bones.

Words hurt. Just like sticks and stones.

Make everything real. Words become heart trapped.

Sound different when released. Like a dove caught in the flame.

Words are often misconstrued. Especially muffled behind a mask.

What becomes of that virtual hug? No imprint.

No scent, no warmth. No memory.

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Our body cannot store them. Virtual hugs flat-line, the screen goes blank. Unless computer memory bank stores them? Cold. Clinical.

Children in prams or buggies peer out at faces shielded by all sorts of patterns. Stripes and polka dots.

Amazon goes crazy. Masks with mini masterpieces appear. Klimt’s The Kiss displays over mouths. Mickey Mouse is there too.

The sublime and the ridiculous.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

Masks take the flirtatious language of eyes to a whole new level. Yet, all things aside, masks keep us safe. Hand washing and masks.

Faces become strange new shapes to children.

Mothers and fathers screened off.

So much technology.

Phones, IPads, televisions. Always a device to turn on or switch over. No shutting it down.

Technology keeps us in touch. Keeps us from going mad. Drives us mad. …Fly over here, little blue butterfly So we will know we are not alone…

Nature sends us messages of hope. Or tries to.

The rose blooms, sheds its petals pinkly over concrete.

Concrete surfaces soften.

Hard concrete so unpleasing.

Then we see something small and it burgeons.

How vanilla scent attracts honey bees.

Busy, busy bee. Going about the business of honey, tiny mandibles working, honey gathering pellet on thread-thin hind leg.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Is there anything as heart-breaking?

Blue butterfly hovers near lazy dragonfly.

Nature’s call answered. Seasons safe-guarded. The natural world protected.

Callistemon opens its crimson glory in July.

Bottle brush spiky appearance, a Punk Rocker of the botanical world.

In the early weeks, warm weather and bird song had us thinking we were back in the Garden of Eden.

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Back in the back garden. Front gardens so public.

But lockdown gardens, front ones especially, become eerie.

So few pass up or down the neighbourhood.

Lucky enough to have a garden. Grateful for floral mercies. Birdsong wakes the dawn.

Blackbirds sing, seagulls raucous.

Far from the sea in Tallaght.

Temptation arrives in the crossing over the line.

We can only travel allocated distances yet some folk can’t be restrained, taking back-roads to avoid checkpoints. Travelling at night or early morning. Most of us stay home, with all the time in the world.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

The Pandemic gave me time To sit and knit.

Knitting up a storm. Baby quilts, baby jackets.

Rainbow coloured blankets.

Weft and warp, two different sides.

Pandemic ‘idleness’ causes a baby boom.

One door closes, another opens.

We count infection numbers on the abacus of long, weary days.

Numbers mount up. In hospitals, ICUs. We praise frontline workers and light candles.

They deserve so much more. Risking lives.

All we are asked to do is stay home. Stay home and wash our hands and wear a mask.

Weeds poke through cracks. Tomorrow’s work.

Always tomorrow in a topsy turvy world.

Planning and execution, two different things.

More in the plotting, re-inventing, formulating The Big Plan.

Through a haze of smoke (hardly the time to quit), gardens grow wild, go back to Eden.

‘Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’

Solace in old nursery rhymes or sayings.

There’s a rhyme for everything only there’s no reason in the virus that’s stripped the world.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Emptied it out like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

Shuttered businesses.

Took jobs away. Grass grows to the knee.

It used to be the ankle bone.

Daisies proliferate, enough to make enough chains to travel the neighbourhood.

Buttercups too. Yellow lights dotted over the grass.

Floodlights for ants and snails.

“Going back to nature” we say, or “it’s a wild meadow now, we’re going Eco”.

There’s an excuse for everything.

The Garden of Eden becomes a wilderness.

Carnival time for slugs. They eat our bright red dahlias.

We’ve given up caring although we did put soot around the roots. A lovely splurge of powdery soot fallen down a chimney needing to be cleaned.

Nights there’s still a chill and we decide to light the fire, just to be cosy, a belch of smoke fills the room.

Big ugly black smoke. Smoke signals.

Fly over here, little blue butterfly So we will know we are not alone…

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Seasons bring blue joy. Like spring bluebells.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

Tell the truth of the moment. A bottle brush will only open its crimson spirals in July. Daffodils brighten in spring. Plants arrive when due, like a much looked forward to new arrival. Sometimes, nature goes awry.

Early December births spring flowers.

Birds confused. Nesting out of nesting season.

Rain comes, then warming sun.

Nature keeps track, is a map of weather, a barometer of mood. We must place our trust yet seasons too grow confused. Climate changes.

The rain has brought us turloughs, the fields turned to lakes, waiting for swans.

It seems we are always waiting. Always on the look-out.

Same as Vladimir and Estragon waited. Godot might not come, swans inevitably will. Two by two by two. Row by row.

Next generations tucked under snow-white feathers.

Not everything so predictable. Birthing mothers separated from partners.

Men pacing cold corridors.

Hearing new-borns cry from a distance.

Affection at arm’s length.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Who could have predicted when the For Sale sign was planted in our garden that Covid-19 was about to roar into our lives and prolong the agony of our move?

Who indeed? One minute looking forward to St Patrick’s Day. Parades, green beer. Tomfoolery.

O’Connell Street flaring with lights and music.

Orange beards, leprechauns, men in drag.

Then comes an announcement.

Everything cancelled. Freeze frozen. Schools closed.

Lockdown.

Marathons un-run, festivals put back until next year (which doesn’t come either). House moves delayed.

House arrest. We run out of patience but not toilet rolls. Yards of it accumulate.

Each house has enough to wrap around itself at least six times. Toilet roll shelves become bare.

Panic.

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Shelves fill up. Riots are avoided.

We can get through anything with enough toilet paper.

And comfort food. Biscuits, cakes.

Lockdown weight accumulates. Like Sisyphus, we roll the lockdown stone(s) up and down The Hill of Good Intentions.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

We lose, we gain. We go up, we go down.

Always a queue.

Security men appear at supermarket doors.

Checking faces for masks. Sanitisation is the new ritual, the new religion.

We must sanitise. Wash our hands.

Even Rossetti knew that.

A big transformation comes about.

Like turning an overcoat inside out.

Hall of Mirror distortion.

Only Covid-19 brings no joy.

There are no hurdy gurdies, no amusement arcades.

No carousels. No musical chairs.

What got me through it, you ask? A fold up chair, a small flask, the waves endlessly turning on the Bray tideline.

A beautiful peaceful scene, like a Sorolla painting.

Light prickles the waves, its gaze mesmeric. A hazy glow roosts on the horizon.

Bray Head, a challenge. Reaching the top so easy when we’re young.

Climbing the Wicklow Matterhorn. That fold up chair, so portable, unlike our lives in lockdown. We must stay put.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

We must stay put. How lovely though to look out at the sea. To have the sea nearby. A blessing.

While lockdown mileage allows. Travel distance grows narrower.

The sea becomes a romantic notion.

Waves sift and turn. Without us.

The tide comes in.

The tide goes out. comme ci, comme ça…

The joy of exploring my immediate location versus the heartache of not seeing or smelling the sea.

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Not everyone can get to the sea however. Views from windows: a concrete lump or a field or a neighbour’s washing line.

Lady of Shalott fashion we left our loom and crossed the room to peer down on Camelot. Whatever that might be.

The mountains in South Dublin, sanctuary.

Where Oisín returned to after Tir na Nóg.

Riding a white steed, young and vigorous.

An Irish Sir Lancelot. Until his stirrup broke.

He touched earth, tumbled into old age.

Or like Bowie in The Man who Fell to Earth.

Never the same. No crime in growing old.

It’s a conversational opener now though.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

How did you get through it?

As if Covid-19 Lockdown was (is?) an obstacle course.

Lockdown Grand National. High fences.

Discipline’s Beecher’s Brook.

Not being able to see anyone. Or touch them.

Keeping within five, then ten kilometres.

Trying not to binge too much on box sets.

Netflix a saviour and a devil. Oscillating between couch potato and exercising in Sean Walsh Park.

Or Tymon. Talking to the geese, glad they are still together after all these years. A couple of honky-tonk swells.

So beautiful they bring tears.

So fluorescent. Like snow in April.

Waddling along on the grass, not a care in their wide, green world.

Letters coming in the door have to be sent a certain way.

No saliva stuck stamps or envelopes.

Anything posted from China left in the shed for three days at least.

Having to contain oneself, to delay the pleasure of opening, unheard of before now. The postman welcome.

Sounds of the letter dropping provides a break from tedium.

Always that suspense.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Who is it from? Where is it from? Inevitably it’s a bill.

Or an appointment we pin to the fridge.

Who writes letters anymore?

Only emergency appointments kept.

Email and WhatsApp and Text. Twitter.

Okay and all immediate. Being in the cloud.

Jack in the Beanstalk. A friend texts and emails, elegant. Interesting. Filled with witty, intelligent observations.

Keeping Ithaca always in mind, I set out through the bloodied fur and feathers of lockdown to find again my life, my loves, my tribe.

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An odyssey. That’s what lockdown was (is?). Homer truly understood the nature of odyssey. Travelling through hours, trying to find distractions, a mission, make something from nothing, a magician without the rabbit in a hat.

De-cluttering. De-activating habits of a lifetime.

Newspapers stored under furniture, notebooks balancing uneven floors. Clothes in attic storage.

Ornaments in boxes. Photographs in folders, still unframed. Whittling down the hoard.

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LIVES ON THE LINE

Time spent in second-hand shops, boot sales, sales of work, jumble sales.

A jumbled stash. Other people’s cast-offs. Finding out that so much room is filled with memories that do not belong.

So, it begins. Optimism rises. Plummets.

Swings and roundabouts. Life is separated into piles.

Keep, throw away, donate.

So much buried under rubble.

So much to excavate.

Sometimes it’s enough to see, on the ground, the empty shell of a swallow’s egg, believing it has hatched out and become itself.

Space starts to clear. Like skies after a winter of cloud.

We see the wood, without some of the trees.

Space becoming light. Airy. Like becoming oneself but not until after those painful excursions.

The dark night of the soul. A locking down opens certain padlocked doors. Entrances to heartache, kept in the dark through distractions. Screaming to get out.

Beckett’s ballast of the everyday never truer.

The plugging in of a kettle, the waiting for it to boil, the making of a coffee or a cup of tea.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Life measured out in Eliot’s coffee spoons.

Or bowls of soup. So much time. Days when; Endless & gifted, dark clouds have not sifted.

Those are the days when shadows begin to assemble.

Too long kept in the waiting room, they enter into the light to be examined.

A full NCT. It’s a glaring light, hurts the eyes.

But those shadows are going nowhere. They’ve waited for this. Body and soul try to be wise, filter the amount of pain a human can take.

There’s always beauty in truth.

No matter how harsh. Lockdown’s a time for looking guilt in the eye.

A time for stepping up to the plate. Then it dissolves.

That terrible secret dreaded and feared and kept chained up like Bertha Mason Rochester in the attic.

Third Floor.

It’s become somehow less threatening out in the open.

I got rid of a man who was awful to me in our relationship. I’m free, happier and more appreciative of life.

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We shed the good, the bad but mostly the ugly.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

We rebirth. We take stock. Keep track.

Time to take a breath.

We shuck off what is weighing us down and feel lighter.

We grow another skin.

Some days. Not everyday mind. But some days. And then, after such catharsis, we begin to start missing things again.

I missed the library and the interaction with people.

I missed the friendly, helpful staff. Thank you for what you do.

Substitute the library for coffee shop, hairdressing salon, church, cinema, restaurants. Haircuts.

We’re like shaggy sheepdogs or sheep in need of shearing. We tie back our hair in topknots like the Suebian tribes of old (to add height) or bunch it up under hats and turbans.

And then we realise we can cut our own hair. Badly but still…and who’s to know what’s under a headscarf?

We even trim the hair of partners and children.

Prepare the ‘salon’ with nice towels and clean comb.

We take down our sharpest scissors and mimic what we see in the hairdressing salons. Or watch Youtube tutorials.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

We go through the motions. Wash first, condition, then sit before a mirror or sit someone else before a mirror and begin the desecration.

We lift a hank of silky hair and squint our eye and take a deep breath or say a prayer.

Snip. There, it’s done.

An angular fringe. Cock-eyed, slanted. Hair lies on the floor like a caterpillar or a crawling plant loped off before it took over.

Rapunzel potential wiped out in one fell swoop. But at least we can see again.

And we feel lighter too.

Never so glad to be needled.

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So many irritations apart from hair in the eye.

Small bombs that never quite get detonated but are carried around growing larger like a hangover in need of a ‘hair of the dog’. Only that’s a step in the wrong direction.

Anger. Good solid anger needs to be diffused.

We’ll formulate a theory that won’t quite take it away. It’s un-listened to, unseen.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

A feeling of being invisible while others enjoy the full glare of publicity.

Unvoiced.

We write letters to The Editor. Or Joe Duffy’s Liveline.

Or both.

It takes a village to raise a child but it only takes a tiny sentence to start an avalanche.

Maybe that’s the fear talking?

The spark that was once a flame now dulled and dimmed, casting dark shadows, filling my heart with a strange kind of ache, emptiness, loneliness, loss of freedom, loss of control, how I long for the day, how I long for the place, for only people can fill this space.

We’re not quite sure what caused this virus. We have our suspicions, our doubts.

We are fed the popular, the most palatable. We applaud front line workers.

They deserve so much more than our candles in windows, our rounds of applause.

These front line workers have earned eternal gratitude.

They are too busy to conjecture.

Too busy saving lives, comforting the dying, consoling their families.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Conjecturing is for others. Thanks to front line workers, we can say; At 71 I am alive and I am smiling.

Surmise, conjecture, get to the bottom of, come up with a plausible reason. Deduce.

Humans are very adept at this. We’re not like a dog or a cat. They accept when something terrible happens and soon forget.

But we’re not like that.

Surmising, getting to the bottom of, coming up with a plausible reason.

That’s what we do. It boils down to blame. Who can we blame?

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, are NOT to blame.

Perhaps it’s….

An attempt by the earth to cull its most destructive inhabitant.

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Perhaps it is. Since time began, the world has endured plague, quarantine and death.

The Black Death, 200 million lost their lives. The Plague of London.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

The Famine in Ireland. Cycles of cholera and plague.

A never ending story.

We’ve been through the mire, we’ve jumped the wire. from life we won’t yet retire. Sizzling at sixty, I buckle down under Covid-19 restrictions to renew and refresh my life.

The well has not run dry. We’ve lowered the golden pail, we’ve drawn deep and pulled it up again. Each time it’s a little emptier but never completely dry. All we can do is chip away at our resources.

We’ve pedalled our exercise bikes, pushed ourselves to breaking point.

Walked hundreds of miles around our sitting rooms.

We watched Netflix episodes, our own lives no longer episodic.

No more soap opera, over the counter revelations.

No more idle gossip.

Even though we are idle ourselves.

We’ve washed all our winter clothes for next year.

Spring cleaned the corners of our lives. Cancelled the holidays. We’ve labelled cans and jars.

Began making lampshades from last year’s calendars.

We’ve tried to write poetry. Paint. Photograph.

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EILEEN CASEY

We listen to music or play an instrument.

Always the shadow.

Sadness and hope and fear.

A dark time saying goodbye to loved ones And no hugs for those left behind.

Scarcely time to say goodbye. Seeing loved ones in full intensive care breathing apparatus. Hooked up to machines.

Tubes everywhere.

Monitors. Surrounded by doctors and nurses who risk their own lives every day.

Where does such courage come from? Warriors of the hospital wards, gentle, wonderful, healing beings. Angels.

We wish we could breathe for our loved ones.

Mentally we gift them life giving oxygen. Easier than Adam’s rib yet oxygen is such a precious commodity. Breath is life yet it cannot awaken those who have passed.

We mourn those who’ve passed and in our frustration we scream and cry out, AAARRRAHH 22

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

The barbaric yawp. The most primal explosion of grief.

A sound that comes from a place where grief began. In the caverns that have no end.

Morning is so faithful, it comes back to us after being away all night. …Fly over here little blue butterfly So we will know we are not alone….

We must hold onto whatever it is we hold onto. Like drowning men hold onto a lifebuoy. Or hang by the barest of fingertips over a cliff edge, rock upon rock pointing upwards like shark teeth.

Now, as I grapple the dark night of Covid-19…

The world has new prayers. New songs. New stories.

Children have a new lexicon. A new Corona shape.

It’s no longer a crown fit for a king or a queen.

Round like a ball, it looks like a planet with suckers.

Or a bog hole. Bottomless.

Fathomless.

Almost. Almost out the other side, and you tell me you are overwhelmed, I hold you like Michael Angelo’s Pieta, lift your fears into flesh so we can see your pain and begin to talk.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Almost is not the same as being there. Almost is a stepping stone leading to freedom.

Each stepping stone, a positive affirmation brought about by our own efforts.

Rules nevertheless but necessary nevertheless.

Wearing our masks, washing our hands, keeping our distance. We learn to be patient.

Know we cannot jump queues.

Must keep two metres apart.

We’ve finally learned to speak with our eyes.

No coquettish art in eyes above a mask.

The language of the fan.

We peer over our masks and wrinkle our foreheads and make gesticulations with our brows. Our eyes are being read. An honest rendering; how we feel inside.

There’s pain there. Hope. Happiness. Joy. And lots of other things too.

We are not broken, just bent out of shape.

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We are like an old piece of metal that’s been struck by a meteor.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

We need to straighten out the bumps. First of all, acknowledge they are there.

Gangs of cycling Dublin teens lurking around post-apocalyptic streets ‘till twilight, Seeking coloured people’s meat. Someone deal with this before it turns into a plaque. Let us voice it in a poem.

We each deserve to be heard. We each deserve respect, not racism.

No-one deserves to be an outcast.

The pandemic doesn’t discriminate.

Why should we? The pandemic isn’t a reason to be racist.

A reason to redirect our anger at the vulnerable.

The pandemic has shown how easily that societal knowledge between doing good and bad can so easily be blown away.

Order breaks down. But the unacceptable cannot become the acceptable.

Fear does terrible things. We begin to imagine slights and injuries blown out of proportion. It’s because we are out of kilter. Out of focus, a blurred photograph.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

Order breaks down. But the unacceptable cannot become the acceptable.

Fear does terrible things. We begin to imagine slights and injuries blown out of proportion. It’s because we are out of kilter. Out of focus, a blurred photograph.

Body clock all over the place, staying up all night, missing loved ones, missing hugs, Missing the chats.

I have discovered that just the thinnest of threads hold all people in check; the pandemic cut that thread.

I guess we are all in the same boat if that’s consolation.

Even the mighty have fallen. No sign of celebrities. Gone underground.

No red carpets or first night openings. They are not the same as us.

And yet they are.

Indoors – outdoors north of the river, south of the river, blending like floating clouds.

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But this is nothing new for some.

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021

LIVES ON THE LINE

How many times do we think of those in perpetual lockdown? Unable to walk, talk, see or hear?

As a chronic pain sufferer I discovered I lived the last two decades of my life in lockdown. Cocooning. Even before the pandemic.

This is a real testament from a real person. Speaking for others. They can ‘do’ pandemic lockdown in their sleep.

Yet it doesn’t come easy.

For us, there will be an escape. Not so for them.

Look up, God is a child again, the sun smudged crayon on white sky.

The innocence of a child. Able to see the world through the eyes of imagination.

Children construct while we are constructed by the world. Children accept the most bizarre. The strange, the unfamiliar. The child plays.

Communes with the inner child, always ready to search for the rainbow, the mythical crock of gold.

The child creates, is a true artist.

Children lead, we follow: An unknown path through an ancient wood where a chaffinch sings.

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2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

EILEEN CASEY

This beautiful line echoes; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,’ No more dissecting time Soulful connection with human kind.

Yes, the ‘woods’ (whatever form we see the world) will always have magic and mysticism.

Covid-19 has taken so much.

Our work, our mental health, our dear loved ones (may they rest in peace) but it has shown us humanity. Wonderful people (front line workers, volunteers) as well as others in our family circles who rose to the challenge, who squared up to the challenges and were not found wanting.

No matter what happens going forward, we must never forget.

They are still out there, the birds - singing.

Can you hear?

The world is alive, throating its resilience with nature’s tomorrow songs.

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LIVES ON THE LINE

Biographical Note Originally from the Midlands, Eileen Casey lives in South Dublin. Her work is widely published in anthologies by Dedalus, Faber and Faber, New Island, The Stinging Fly, The Nordic Irish Studies Journal, among others.

A Hennessy Award Winner (Emerging Fiction), Casey is also a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Poetry Fellowship recipient, among others.

‘The Strange Case of the Irish Elk’, supported by The Arts Council of Ireland and Offaly Arts, went on show in Errant ArtSpace, BC, Vancouver, September, 2021.

Berries For Singing Birds (Arlen House Poetry, 2019) is her fifth and most recent poetry collection. Bog Treasure is upcoming from Arlen House.

She holds an M.Phil from The Oscar Wilde House, The School of English, Trinity College, Dublin.

Acknowledgements: Gratitude is owed to all who contributed lines (featured in italics) and to Lucan and Clondalkin Libraries for promoting the project. To Social Inclusion, South Dublin County Council for their ongoing support. Thanks to Mark Ulyseas and Live Encounters.

His contribution to arts and literature is immeasurable.

He gives a voice to so many. ©Eileen Casey

2021 September Limited Edition POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net

P O E T R Y & W R I T I N G

Limited Edition published September 2021

Lives on the Line formed part of Bealtaine 2021 celebrations and encompasses both the personal and universal. Building a poem line by line in this way (donated lines are in italics) proved very creative and satisfying. Like a sturdy tree, I felt supported by so many loving branches.

Artist Paul Klee once said, ‘Take a line for a walk’. It was indeed a pleasure to build on lines so generously gathered via Clondalkin and Lucan Libraries.

- Eileen Casey

© liveencounters.net POETRY & WRITING Limited Edition September 2021