The Pain and the Joy of Remembrance

THE PARADOX OF MEMORY

Lately,   just  when I am trying to get to sleep, I am flooded with vivid memories of people  from my past. My mother is with me, my Aunts Anna and Grace and my father who left us, Norman, and of course, my two sisters Janie and Sheila.

MY latest dream-memory was of my younger sister Sheila.  She loved the canary that  I talked my mother into letting me buy from Woolworth's in downtown Pawtucket.

She loved SKIPPER  so much that she would sit in a rocking chair near his cage--she named him SKIPPER.  That  led to her insisting on sitting with the cage on her lap and then  rocking together. She sang and he  sang.

 I don't have that many positive memories of Sheila. 

She died of leukemia when she was only 16  and although she had Down Syndrome, she did not share  our older sister Janie's happy Down Syndrome  personality. Sheila was unhappy and jealous--especially when she noticed  that she was not having the same adventures and experiences as I was enjoying.

She wanted a boyfriend, she wanted to go to dances, and when I brought  my new baby only a month old to her hospital bed, she told my mother after I left, "I want a baby just like Norma."

Such an admixture of happiness and sadness in such memories of the Dead. Things that I have not thought of  for years. and now their immediacy and power take me by surprise.

This poem by Christina Rossetti  was a favorite of mine  when my mother and I  took turns reading poems to each other on the Saturday nights when Anna was out dancing.

She captures the mixedness of memories .

 Remember 

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

BOBBY SANDS: WARRIOR BARD OF LONG KESH

Commemoration  of the 40th Anniversary of the Death of Bobby Sands,  held on May 8, 2021 at the Galway Bay Irish Pub in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

With about one hundred people in attendance, this is the  speech I presented on that day.

BOBBY SANDS : WARRIOR BARD OF LONG KESH

 So glad to be here today to join you all in  celebrating the heroic sacrifice of  ten  Irish  patriots  led on  Hunger Strike by Bobby Sands, Member of Parliament. 40 years have passed since their  glorious martyrdom. I do think that the manner and choice of their deaths made them martyrs and we should rejoice. As Saint Augustine  reminds us "It would be an affront to pray for martyrs, we should pray to them."  Bobby himself said on his last days "God will understand,"

In 1981 we had masses said for them one after another. Now we pray to them and they help us move forward.  Bobby famously called LONG KESH "the Breaker's Yard" but he refused to be broken.

In Rhode Island the Irish Northern Aid became active and created a series of meetings and demonstrations  to try to alter Mrs. Thatcher's seeming determination to see them all die.

We made several trips to Boston to Beacon Hill to make some noise  at the home of the British Consulate. 

I recall that one of those visits coincided with trash night and we  improvised inspired by the  women of Belfast  who often banged trash can lids to warn or British troops policing the area. So we gleefully made a great racket banging trash cans on the elite Beacon Hill.

MY memory of those days and nights is still vivid. On one occasion we requested and were granted an appointment with Senator Claiborne Pell to ask him to endorse the Hunger Strikers.

Can you imagine my dismay, when sitting in his office we made our request?  Pell responded by telling us that he was still grieving for the violent death of his relative and friend whom he called "Dickie" Mountbatten.

Lord Mountbatten had been killed in the summer of 1979 when the IRA placed a bomb in his boat  that he was sailing in a lake near his summer home in County Sligo, Ireland.

I remember thinking --well that is the end of this meeting. And I was right, we soon found ourselves out in the hallway. 

This may sound incredible, but  I did not believe that Bobby Sands would die. 

No, I and many others thought that surely the spectacle of  Ten men lined up for such slow and terrible deaths would cause Mrs. Thatcher to relent. After all, their demands of  non-criminal status did not seem extreme. Surely even the British would see that the  idea that political prisoners  should not be treated as criminals was a reasonable expectation.

We were wrong. 

Mrs. Thatcher never relented in her murderous hatred of the IRA,  and Bobby Sands and his nine soldiers never relented either.

Will you think me foolish if I admit  that I was shocked by the actual death of Bobby Sands? It was a major grief experience for so many Irish Americans. With the hindsight of 40 years, it may all seem inevitable now. However, then it seemed  an impossible tragedy and many of us were shaken by the extent of our own sorrow.  

 We held meetings; we had masses said. It all sounds so inadequate, but that is what we did.

The families of the Hunger  Strikers visited us from Ireland and toured the  cities of American supporters. Our connections became closer and more intimate as we met the brothers and sisters,  and their stories of their loved ones made them like family to us all.

Our crowds grew larger, and so did the donations we collected to support the cause of Irish freedom.

Everyone wanted to meet and  offer hospitality to the grieving relatives.

I worried about their welfare and safety, and it was with a sigh of relief that we delivered them to Hartford-- the next stop on their tour after Providence.

A  recent Google search reveals that Hartford has erected an actual monument to Bobby Sands-- it is the only one in the United States.

My title is  BOBBY SANDS-- WARRIOR BARD OF  LONG KESH.

A TERM PERHAPS NOT CLEAR TO ALL IS LONG KESH

That is the name for a prison  others call The Maze--  situated at the former Royal Air Force station of Long Kesh, on the outskirts of Lisburn. This was in the townland of Maze, about nine miles (14 km) southwest of Belfast. The prison and its inmates were involved in such events as the 1981 hunger strike.

I also want to talk about why I use the term WARRIOR BARD to describe Bobby Sands.  Many of you may have noticed that  I borrowed the term from a well known Irish song  THE MINSTEL BOY by Tom Moore

Land of song said the Warrior bard,

though all the world betray thee

One sword at least thy rights shall guard

One faithful harp shall praise thee.

Warrior Bard --the combination of the poet soldier --  runs deep in Irish  history.  The Bards were  a definite class in Celtic Druidic Ireland.  They were trained as Bards, and they were trained in  their oral tradition. Each of them had to memorize poems and insults and imprecations.  They were  taught orally, and they would lie in dark rooms on beds reciting the verses they heard to memorize them in that darkness.

They were at the  head of the army going into battle hurling their insults and dire  predictions of loss and defeat  at the approaching enemy.

Bobby Sands replicated that oral tradition and  brought it back as the central aspect of their struggle in the cold cells of Long Kesh.  The knowledge of the Irish language  was a valuable tool for communication since the guards did not know Irish.

Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such  an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation.  What a writing workshop he dared to  hold and to produce lines  that we see now are  monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.

— Danny Morrison, October 1981.* * *wrote

"It has been said that were Bobby alive to see these poems today he would have rewritten or changed some of the simpler rhyming words. But that is to miss the point. These poems were written by a young man under the most depressing of conditions. More importantly his poetry is the raw literature of the H-Block prison protest which hundreds of naked men stood up against their cell doors (in the late of night when the Screws left the wings) to listen to and to applaud.

It was their only entertainment, it was a beautifully rendered articulation of their own plight. Out of cruelty and suffering Bobby Sands harnessed real poetry, the poetry of a feeling people struggling to be free..."

Danny Morrison told it straight at the time. It has taken me almost  40 years to  know the truth of his assessment and the significance of Sands' achievement

So the  prisoners embraced their  ancient language.  Bobby Sands writes of language lessons  that were held  "after the screws left" and there were no text books. They learned the language the way we all learned our mother tongue--they learned it  orally. In  an amazing  mimicry the conditions of the Irish prisoners  forced them to recreate the  oral tradition of  Irish. And Bobby Sands emerged as the Bard in that tradition. At night wrapped only in Blankets , the men would stand at their cell doors and  Bobby would lead them in songs and recitations.  He  composed many poems which were song lyrics when he set them to tunes as he did with  his favorite song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." In his own words--

THE VOYAGE

It was 1803 when we sailed out to sea

and away from the sweet town of Derry.

For Australia bound and if we didn't drown

The mark of the fetter we'd carry.

Our ship was the GULL 14 days out of Hull

And on orders to carry the croppy.

Like a ghost in the night she sailed out of sight

Leaving many a wee'un unhappy

In our rusty iron chains well we sighed for our we'ans.

And our good wives we'd left in our sorrow.

And the main sails unfurled our curses we hurled

At the English and the thought of tomorrow.

I would like to end with more of Bobby's words. A cousin of mine  just gave me a prayer card for someone, Oglach Matthew Devlin, who is related to us and died in 2005 in Ireland.

On the back of his card there is a portion of a poem by Bobby Sands,

 THE RHYTHM OF TIME.

Here are two of the verses:

There's an inner thing in every man,

Do you know this thing, my friend?

It has withstood the blows of a million years

And will do so to the end.

It  lights the dark of  this prison cell,

It thunders forth its might.

It is the undauntable thought, my friend,

The thought that says, I'M RIGHT!

4oth Anniversary of Death of Bobby Sands

HUNGER STRIKES ARE BACK IN THE NEWS

An opposition leader in Russia has been jailed and is now on hunger strike.  His failing health has caused an international outcry. President Biden has warned the Russian government that since he is under  their care and jurisdiction, there will be consequences if he is allowed to die.

Forty years ago there was no Presidential outcry when ten Irish  political prisoners were allowed to die one after the other over a long and terrible summer in 1981.

 They are not forgotten here  and even if the commemorations are fewer world wide. Ireland will always remember and  in Pawtucket it is time  to celebrate them anew. 

In tribute to the ten men who gave their lives on hunger strike for the cause of Irish freedom.

 Vol. Bobby Sands, IRA 

Vol. Francis Hughes, IRA 

Vol. Patsy O'Hara, INLA 

Vol. Raymond McCreesh, IRA 

Vol. Joe McDonnell, IRA

 Vol. Martin Hurson, IRA 

Vol. Kevin Lynch, INLA 

Vol. Kieran Doherty, IRA 

Vol. Thomas McElwee, IRA 

Vol. Michael Devine, INLA

DURATION  OF THEIR HUNGER STRIKE AND DATES OF THEIR DEATHS

 Sands 5 May 81 66 days Hughes 12 May 81 59 days O'Hara 21 May 81 61 days McCreesh 21 May 81 61 days McDonnell 8 July 81 61 days Hurson 13 July 81 46 days Lynch 1 Aug 81 71 days Doherty 2 Aug 81 73 days McElwee 8 Aug 81 62 days Devine 20 Aug 81 60 days

66 DAYS ON HUNGER STRIKE
1 March 1981 to 5 May 1981

66 long days -- And during those days I could think of nothing but his suffering.
It preyed on my mind and pushed me to become active in the Northern AID movement in that  year of 1981. 

I HAVE NOT SPOKEN  HIS NAME ALOUD  FOR AWHILE, AND  SURELY  I HAVE NOT PRAISED  HIM FOR MANY YEARS IN PUBLIC.

But surely the time has come at last to praise--  
THE  LAST IRISH BARD --- BOBBY SANDS, MP.

And the driving force against oppression, as Bobby concludes, is the moral superiority of the oppressed.

Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such  an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation.  What a writing workshop he dared to  hold and to produce lines  that we see now are  monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.

* * *

"It has been said that were Bobby alive to see these poems today he would have rewritten or changed some of the simpler rhyming words. But that is to miss the point. These poems were written by a young man under the most depressing of conditions. More importantly his poetry is the raw literature of the H-Block prison protest which hundreds of naked men stood up against their cell doors (in the late of night when the Screws left the wings) to listen to and to applaud.

It was their only entertainment, it was a beautifully rendered articulation of their own plight. Out of cruelty and suffering Bobby Sands harnessed real poetry, the poetry of a feeling people struggling to be free..."

— Danny Morrison, October 1981.

Danny Morrison told it straight at the time. IT has taken me almost  40 years to read and  know the truth of his assessment.

---

MODERN TIMES

It is said we live in modern times,
In the civilised year of ‘seventy nine,
But when I look around, all I see,
Is modern torture, pain, and hypocrisy.

In modern times little children die,
They starve to death, but who dares ask why?
And little girls without attire,
Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire.

And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones,
Young children bury their parents’ bones,
And secret police in the dead of night,
Electrocute the naked woman out of sight.

In the gutter lies the black man, dead,
And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red,
And there was He who was born and came to be,
But lived and died without liberty.

As the bureaucrats, speculators and presidents alike,
Pin on their dirty, stinking, happy smiles tonight,
The lonely prisoner will cry out from within his tomb,
And tomorrow’s wretch will leave its mother’s womb!


We can see  from this poem that Bobby Sands was not a person with a narrow Nationalist vision; he had a dream of international solidarity.  He was seeking to forge a United Front with  all the oppressed of the world,

 It is significant that Sands opens the first part of the poem, “The Crime of Castlereagh”, with an assertion of his individuality:

• 29 Sands, op. cit., p. 104.

I scratched my name and not for fame
Upon the whitened wall;
“Bobby Sands was here,” I wrote with fear
In awful shaky scrawl.
I wrote it low where eyes don’t go
Twas but to testify,
That I was sane and not to blame
Should here I come to die

 LOVER OF BIRDS
I learn from  doing the reading of Bobby's now published prison diary that that Bobby Sands and I share something--we both love  birds.  Of course the Sky lark is  central to his poems but also the curlew and the  crows  play their part in relieving his sense of isolation  in his cell  as he is slowly dying over 66 days,

Here from a diary he  kept for the first 17 days of his Hunger strike:

"The birds were singing today. One of the boys threw bread out of the window. At least somebody was eating!
I was lonely for a while this evening, listening to the crows caw as they returned home. Should I hear the beautiful lark, she would rent my heart. Now, as I write, the odd curlew mournfully calls as they fly over. I like the birds.
Well, I must leave off, for if I write more about the birds my tears will fall and my thoughts return to the days of my youth.
They were the days, and gone forever now. But I enjoyed them. They are in my heart -- good night, now."
This from a man who was  just 27 years old when he died and had spent the last 9 years in brutal imprisonment. His love of the natural world and of the small free creatures  shines here.

Bobby Sands also  skewered the role of the renowned Irish poets who did not join their voices to his but who hid behind the aesthetic
masks :

The Men of Art have lost their heart,
They dream within their dreams.
Their magic sold for price of gold
Amidst a people’s screams.
They sketch the moon and capture bloom
With genius, so they say.
But ne’er they sketch the quaking wretch
Who lies in Castlereagh.

• 64 Ibid., p. 111.

The poet’s word is sweet as bird,
Romantic tale and prose.
Of stars above and gentle love
And fragrant breeze that blows.
But write they not a single jot
Of beauty tortured sore.
Don’t wonder why such men can lie,
For poets are no more.

21Those two stanzas encapsulate a scathing criticism of what Sands perceives as a reprehensible lack of interest in the prison protest by writers in the North. Once again, there is a clear sense that the pastoral mode which Sands evidently uses as a sort of umbrella for poetry and art more generally, is not only inadequate to the task of representing the prison protest but also works to eradicate it from sight. 

As much as he loved birds and nature he would not use  them to distract himself or his readers from the  terrors that man's inhumanity to man  has wreaked on the world and all its inhabitants.

 In putting these entries together on poets who changed the world, I have omitted many.

Somehow,  I was not letting myself think of BOBBY.  But when I completed the Padraic Pearse entry, I could not stop there: I could not leave it as if no poet bard had died for Ireland since Pearse.  That would be a lie.

YES, there was one other giant-- BOBBY SANDS.

Even now I know that there are many whose teeth are set on edge at the very thought of him. 

This blog is not for them.

But there are others who have come to see that he was a great leader and martyr and poet.

THIS BLOG ENTRY IS FOR YOU  AND YOUR SACRED MEMORY---MISE EIRE--  BOBBY SANDS.

LENT IS TIME TO TAKE STOCK OF OR LIVES AND OUR DAILY EXPERIENCES

 Taking stock of our lives

Once upon a time, an ancient story tells us, the master had a visitor who came to inquire about Zen. But instead of listening, the visitor kept talking about his own concerns and giving his own thoughts. After a while, the master served tea. He poured tea into his visitor’s cup until it was full and then he kept on pouring.
 
Finally, the visitor could not bear it any longer, “Don’t you see that my cup is full?” he said. “It’s not possible to get anymore in.”
 
“Just so,” the master said, stopping at last. “And like this cup, you are filled with your own ideas. How can you expect me to give you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
 
Lent is the process of emptying our cups. 

Lent is a time for trimming the soul and scraping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord, we have the spiritual stamina to say yes to its twists and turns with faith and with hope.

I also think that this PANDEMIC and so  much time at home is pushing more reflection on us.

I think about  junctions in my life when I made choices which made a huge difference. Also it is impossible to go back to those  crossroads. They are in the  irretrievable PAST.

 Each road chosen leads us to others. 

It reminds me of that enigmatic poem by  Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken

 

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

Somethng I share with President Biden

 Since the inauguration of our new  President there have been numerous stories about his long life of struggle and his many  attempts to become  President.

One aspect of his difficulties that is mentioned is his  problem of stuttering. 

 I do not understand my own  experience of stuttering, but I did share this both humiliating and  repetitive experience that undermines  every attempt to communicate.

My stuttering surfaced when I was about four years old.

 I recall that  I  was certain that the stuttering was  a sign that I also was like my two sisters who had Down Syndrome,  "RETARDED." 

That was the accepted term then-- better than Mongol or Idiot that people often hurled at them when we  went out to play.

So when I started in Kindergarten at Prospect Street School I  was extremely aware of my stuttering. I had to plan ahead what I was going to say. The M-sound was impossible.  I could not say Ma or Mommy or Mother.  So when I raised my hand to answer a question in class I had to find a way to answer without that dreaded M sound.  I did not always succeed.  and so the fact of my  speaking disorder came to light.  When  that happened I was consigned to a Speech therapy group. And I do  remember how shameful it felt to me that I had to stand and leave the class when those sessions were  scheduled.

I did not like the fact that the group that I was assigned to had people in it that were  slow learners and that had trouble speaking  at all. Also I was in the same school as my older sister Janie. And she often raised a ruckus in the hallways  there and I would be called out of class to calm her down.  THAT was not easy.

I also  dreaded the recess  times when I often  tried to defend Janie as she attempted to play with the girls in the school yard,  She saw this as  interference and told me to let her play,  She did not mind that they were using her as a steady-ender  when they jumped rope and she never had a turn,  I minded that fact but she was just glad to be in the game.

All these  situations made me long to be in another school. The  final blow was the scene in my speech therapy.  The  man leading it kept on saying that I was not moving my tongue correctly.  He put his fingers into my mouth and I could not tolerate it and bit down on his hand which I did not want in my mouth.  He yelled at me and sent me to the principal's office.

 It was a time of disgrace and mortification and I was crying  when the principal came into the room. She admired my dress which my mother had made from a fabric that was  a design of open and closed books,  She asked how someone who could read and write so well was crying in her office, I told her and she said I  would be excused from speech therapy in the future, 

I was grateful, but I was determined to leave.  I was  at the same time  receiving instruction  in preparation for making my first communion in the next year.

I began  talking  about how much I loved the religious instruction and wished I could go to a Catholic School.

My mother  agreed with me and encouraged me, and she talked my Baptist father into  letting me leave the public school. 

I started the Second grade at Saint Joseph's School, and my life was transformed.

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

 SO glad to be Back in the Bucket after sometime  at the Brigham in Boston.

It is a great hospital and I am grateful that I can go there for procedures and surgeries.

But I am grateful to be back in my home and awaiting the first big storm of the year.

This really feels like Xmas to me and brings me back to the Xmas times of my childhood.

I recall one  Xmas when my mother waited until near Xmas  Eve to purchase a tree. I was so afraid that  we were not going to get one,  Then she told me to dress warmly and walk with her to a place where she had noticed trees for sale. It was a freezing night in December  but I was happy to  go. We left my two sisters alone and we  looked up to the second floor tenement  windows where they were  both watching us and waving happily.

When we arrived we had walked  what seemed to me a long way in the wind and blowing snow. We went up Columbus Avenue and there he was a man with a few lopsided and skinny trees  standing in a bare spot next to the railroad tracks on York Avenue. He was closing shop and clearly did not expect  to sell these  neglected and rejected trees.

My mother told him that she  had only 5 dollars. Could he sell her a tree for that  price?

He looked at her and me shivering in the wind  and he picked the scrawniest of a scrawny bunch and tied it up for us and took the five dollars. Then my mother  picked up the  trunk end and  I held  onto the  top of the tree and we retraced our steps. 

 When we got to our house on Englewood Avenue, we looked up and my sisters were watching for us still.  We waved and they came running down the front stairs to  help and the four of us  hauled  that tree inside. I said that we had waited to the  last moment. She laughed and said yes and in two days we could pick out a better one from  trees thrown out  the day after Xmas.  

We laughed and said  that we would keep ours for the Twelve Days of Christmas.  AND WE DID.

NOSTALGIA DURING THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

 CHRISTMAS WAS ALWAYS A MIXED BAG

I have already written about  the ways that my Aunt Grace provided  the food for our Thanksgiving and also our Christmas feasts.  But there is so much more to  Christmas than the  big meal which is really the entire focus of Thanksgiving.

We had various ways of preparing for Christmas.We thought a lot about Advent.  I also tried to go to daily mass.  Devotional aspects of the season increased after my father's departure in 1953.

Even before that sad event we celebrated or at least I did by saving whatever money I had and buying Xmas gifts.  Our gifts to each other were  not very glamorous. I would pace around Grants and Woolworth's looking at lipsticks for my Aunt Anna and  a perfume for my mother. I got my sisters paddle balls one year and that was a big hit. They could  play with them quite successfully. I had seen them borrow those of other kids, and I knew they could make the ball bounce off the paddle.
 I remember that when my friend Lucille came over to see  my tree and gifts and she looked at the three piles of  gifts that we had opened--one for each of us children. They were almost identical--pajamas, underwear, a new robe, socks. She said, "I see that you have a very practical Xmas." My mother laughed and my Aunt Anna said that she was rude. She was not, she was just being truthful.
We did not get toys. None of us cared about dolls.The only thing that I got that my sisters did not get would be paper doll books and coloring books. Our stockings were filled with an orange and an apple and some walnuts in the shell. Also sometimes hair ribbons or hair clips.
One winter I  had complained to my Aunt Grace that I had to wear some cast off hockey skates of Lucille's brother when we went to the  Blue Pond to skate.  I was amazed when new  lovely white figure skates showed up under the tree for me.There was no giver's name--these were from Santa.  My mother  warned me  not to whine anymore to  my Aunt Grace and I  knew what that meant.
Aunt Grace was always  my secret Santa.  
When  my father was still with us, I do recall some  sudden eruption of a great gift--like a tricycle. Later when I was about six, he brought in a large and gorgeous doll house. Somehow, there was some suggestion of  scandal  about these gifts--that he had won them in a card game or even stolen them.

 I remember that one Christmas morning he reached under his pillow and took out a small box and in it was a gold cross very plain and simple on a gold chain.  I still have that cross.