CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ARDBOE IN IRELAND AND THE BUCKET

HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM A POEM WRITTEN BY MY MOTHER'S GREAT UNCLE JOHN COLEMAN OF MULLINAHOE

THE POET GREETS THE COMING OF THE AUTUMN SEASON.

A few lines from "Autumn"

He is coming, we expected him to visit us again,
You can see him creeping, creeping on his path across the plain,
And everything he touches, as with a magic wand,
He turns from green to golden on his passage o'er the land.
He is coming from the southward, from very far away,
Where they never see their shadows at the noontide of the day;
And he visits every nation, he visits every clime,
His lips are stained a crimson with the produce of the vine.

Here the poet imagines the season of Autumn as a man  advancing across the  globe from the Equator to the northern  climes.

My mother was aware in the 1920s and 1930s of this poet in her family because someone in Ireland would send her father a clipping of John Coleman's poems as they were published.  She remembers coming home from school to find her father opening mail from Ireland--always  an exciting event--and reading them aloud. 
Sad to say, my mother did not believe that this poet was her father's Uncle.  I think that she could not imagine the life  they describe of a fishing community settled for centuries around the largest Lake in the British Isles, Lough Neagh.

My mother used the  wickedest Irish weapons -- satire  and sarcasm.  I now see that these are the weapons of an oppressed person who cannot allow herself to believe that there is something to be proud of in her history. 

In fact in Celtic society one of the tasks of the bard was to create satires  of the enemies of the Clan.  There were schools for bards and fili and in those schools the student poets would  create their lines while  lying on beds in darkened rooms and  committing them to memory. The bards were not  literate nor were most of their listeners.

Did you see that? Poems were composed in the dark.

























The students in the poetry schools for bards would  lie on beds in darkened rooms. There they would  compose and recite aloud line by line the poems  they were  creating.
Then they would recite the lines and accompany themselves on the harp.  The poets were the keepers of the clan's memory.At the risk of seeming obsessed, I must point out connections between this way of educating poets in an illiterate society and the enforced way that BOBBY SANDS wrote his poetry and the way the  other  Republican Prisoners in Long Kesh learned and memorized the Irish language.BOBBY SANDS  would lie on his filthy blanket , naked because of their refusal to wear  prison clothes  meant for criminals.He would  say his lines to himself out loud and when teh lights were off and the  sadistic prison guards had gone off the floor, he would stand at  the door of his cell and recite his new lines out loud so the other  prisoners could  hear them, remember them and  find solace  in the fact  that their leader had not been broken.  WHAT MORE HAS ANY BARD DONE FOR HIS PEOPLE?

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