Scene 1:
A Viking bank protected the timber fort with stone, horse hair, horse blood and eggshell – and they are still bound tight.
Duv Lin, the Black Pool is filled by a garden with paths of writhing eels, best viewed from a State Room of the castle. One is known not for the Van Dyke painting of silk, but for holding James Connolly. State Apartments were converted into a Red Cross Military Hospital to nurse soldiers in the First World War. Shrapnel to his ankle had set gangrene in. From there he was taken to Kilmainham Gaol on a stretcher, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a snug corner of Stonebreakers’ Yard and shot by firing squad.
Scene 2:
Small farms, fields throttled by stone walls, stone gathered for millennia, pulled and dragged then balanced firmly for sons, wives, cousins, chiefs, priests. The mean generosities of an economy of scale.
Scene 3:
The Gravediggers, the sawdust floor, a teargas thick haze of smoke, best Guiness in the city and fine craic in the snugs.
Scene 4:
I can’t find my notes, or my memories, on my visit to the castle, the Martello Tower where happy-go-lucky Buck Mulligan crowned himself king. And now I am being called to board.
Mise en scene:
A movie set, a vision full of motion and noise. To the left, a cluttered building site.
Vehicles transgress the apron, planes begin circling and taxiing, a seamless rhythm of doings, lights flashing in a white sky, rain drops jumping down the glass, tears from one leaving another one behind.
Backstory:
I have been face-to-face with the rain in Ireland, the peat bogs, merlins mewing in the wild mountain passes where the only walls are ruined and veins sound a babbling madness. But let’s be clear, the planet is running out of fresh water.
.
John Bennett is a widely published poet who has won major Australian prizes and published five books. He has a PhD in poetics and has written and taught ecological literature and thinking at university and continuing education centres. He was Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival and worked with Aboriginal storytellers for the Saltwater Freshwater Arts Alliance. John won the Mattara (now Newcastle) Poetry Prize in 1989 and the inaugural David Tribe Poetry Prize in 2008. He was runner-up in the New Shoots Sydney Poetry Prize, Red Room Poetry, 2016.
2026 Bloomsday Supplement - Table of Contents
