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| Poetry by
Clare Kirwan
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The Man with the Strongest Face in the World (In the Red 2008) Return (Barnwood 2008) The Keeper (Feile Filiochta 2008) The Iron Men (The Writer's Eye 2007) Moses came to Merseyside (www.poem800.com 2007) Birdsong Tinnitus (Iota 2003) The nights that you remember (The Ugly Tree 2006) The other person knows you are waiting (Iota 2006) The Silence Museum (Aberrant Dreams 2005) So many things I should be doing (Contemporary Rhyme 2007) Wierd Week (In the Red 2007)
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The Rain Dog Man He had a voice like someone shaking a pan of rusty nails and his hair was an electro static conduction experiment. His hands were rough as emery boards with seven year’s growth of rich, black earth under the nails where he grew tiny vegetables. His mouth was a great dark hole full of tombstone teeth, with worn away lettering: Here lies the body of… safe in the arms of... He had a tattoo of a combustion engine and when he flexed his muscles, those pistons really worked and steam rose off them. He answered to anything but his own name and he sang songs about the olden days before electrocution, before dinosaurs. He’d offer you anything he had, which wasn’t much – an old tin mug that smelled of whiskey, pliers black with dried blood, a handful of postcards from
some false eyes, or a coat with gold buttons which he never wore. And when he laughed, it carried all over town like seed heads exploding and when he lifted you up you felt it would never stop; you’d fly on up into the stratosphere. I watched him take his shirt off once and I saw he was branded like cattle, the scar so old and pitted. He drew a finger around it’s shape and said: No man ever owns you. When he died all the neighbourhood dogs went to his grave and stayed until the first rain of autumn, and in the spring, it came up with flowers no-one had ever seen or had a name for. to
wait in line, to be on time, a
seat given up for the elderly, a
forest of hands at the call for volunteers, a
space in the car park and later the
car to still be there. changeable
weather, a spate of burglaries, postal
strikes, council tax, trains delayed, letters
of complaint to go unanswered, the
quiet loner to be a pedophile nothing
to change. to
win the lottery, no matter how unlikely, to
never see a soldier from another country, to
win in the final moment, in injury time, to
lose in the final moment, in injury time, to
vomit late-night fast food welfare,
shelter, food, water, a
good range of choices a la carte, quality
items at the lowest prices, any
fruit or vegetable in every season, someone
else to pick up litter. new
houses and green spaces to
reduce asthma, to drive everywhere, immediate
service, fewer refugees a
place in heaven – near the front, a
clamp down on asylum. everything
to be ‘for the best’ them
to know what they are doing the
right thing to happen – without
a battle, without many voices raised despite the quiet apathy of the multitude.
(Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008)
On
January 1st, 2008 on
the stroke of midnight we opened the gates to
expectant for
a new and magical mystery tour. Sir
Paul, still loved at 67 (along
with the youthful ghost of Lennon) leads daily tours through the city’s streets - where lambananas safely bleat - to
St Georges Hall, with its floor licked clean by
some local teenagers on a scheme, and
leads a series of cultured talks on
us learning to eat with knives and forks. As
an encore, footy fans now lurch through
every pub from the bombed out church to
the Pier Head, and back again in
a heady mix of beer and phlegm. As
the council announces some new edicts: all
scousers must carry tickling sticks and
know 4 verses of ‘Liverpool Home’ and
no-one can ever walk alone, Then
with song and dance, with mime and rap we'll
all paint and
poets, to celebrate the city’s culture will
struggle for rhymes (other than vulture) -
though it must be said that the money due might
wing its way to the usual few who’ll
retire down south when it’s getting late on
31st December 2008.
She heard the music but still she walked past the Cavern in those heady early days before the sixties came swinging in, intent on shopping – her bottom drawer full of linen, not vinyl. Come with us! Her friends chattering in the Cotton Exchange typing pool, then the tap… tap… tap of her heels on polished floors and pavements down to Lewis’s, blushing below the naked statue – all that to come – her mother measuring her twenty one inch waist, the snip of pinking sheers through satin those last Waterloo evenings, Her friends still hummed with pop and possibilities: These
four are fab! Come with us! But she never did go. All she needed was love Love, she said, is all you need.
Birdsong
Tweet, tweet, tweet. All the bloody time. She was lucky, they said, to have birdsong tinnitus. It was quite rare. Others had bombs and guns – the artillery kind. So everywhere was like a summer meadow, her head rang with twittering which no-one else could hear (except her cat, which perked a psychic ear towards that invisible chirping, tweeting, peeping, keeping two inscrutable eyes on her - waiting for feathers.) She’d always hated birds – nasty little heads and beady eyes, always watching and pecking and crapping. In all weathers and seasons each dawn welcomed her with a cheerful chorus that went on all day and all night until the next dawn and the next one repeating an endless anthem of joy and hope, a fresh and innocent soundtrack to accompany all the bad things that happened to her. As her life grew bleak the birds still sang their dainty cage inside her head, immune from all her rage - right up until she pulled the trigger on some kind of hunting rifle to silence those damned birds.
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top
but
within these walls, more than a metre thick, we
hold, insulated, the history and
lost examples of silence. Visitors
are ushered, whispering through
padded cubicles, astounded. Turn
off you phones and music, speak
only in whispers. We
Curators live in silence. It
is our vocation – chosen from
the quietest children we
were trained to listen. It
is like a religion. The
first floor is devoted to
the silence before a sound with
perfect specimens of the pregnant pause: the
counted silence between flash and thunder that
measures your distance from a storm, the
animal quiet of the dog that will be first to bite, the
charged stillness of a held breath between
the last tick and the explosion, and,
the prize of our collection, the
last natural recording of a pin about to drop. Beautiful
isn’t it? On
other floors we preserve examples
of the silence after a sound – the
straining, listening silence after the
bump in the night, the
sullen tongue-holding of the instructed silence, one
minute’s silences filled with awkward sorrow, and
rare samples from ground zero those
twin silences of shock and awe. Our
interactive exhibit invites you to consider: the
silence of the crowd at the call for volunteers, the
silence of a majority who oppose without speaking –
the silence that is mistaken for complicity, the
silence that is suffered in. Listen
for a moment… Our
researchers amass and list examples that
measure silence – its depth and width from
the silence of mutual understanding which
needs no vocabulary to
the dumb silence of incomprehension, from
an argument seen through triple-glazed windows to
the last wilderness on a windless day. Many
silences are near extinction. But
we can manufacture them using
the exact wavelengths and frequencies that
echo the weighty absence of sound in space, and
we are close to containing that
final silence when
your own music stops, and
your body ceases whispering its
rhythmic commentary.
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