Galway Advertiser 1999/1999_06_24/GA_24061999_E1_056.pdf 

Extracted text

Galway Advertiser June 24 1999

THAT'S

ETRA MN NETI ET N

ngs
edited by Fred Johnston

BLOTTINGS:
The last -Lunch on the Island' reading will feature novelist and short storj writer Mike McCormack on Wednesdax June 30 at 1.05pm. Canavan House. Nun's Island. Proceeds to Galway Centre for the Unemployed.

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CATTLE CARS
The newspaper ad requests Dead And Worn-Out Animals And guarantees Daily Collection.

SERBIAN LOVE
the grass grows. Branch puts forth leaf. But I have no one. My lover is away in another country.

T H E BURNING O FT H E MAPS
When he was questioned, Alexander admitted he did not really know why he reached for his matches when he entered the history room on October 25, the Anniversary of the Liberation of Vukovar. it was the maps that upset him, he told the Head, ordinary school maps hanging on the classroom wall, of Tito's Federal Yugoslavia: six republics and two autonomous provinces; Vojvodina and the Kosovo. Alex said he could not help seeing the lines of irregulars moving through the villages, the precise way bullets scar the houses and prune away the blossom from the apple trees. You can toss a grenade into a cellar, it's as easy as beating cats in a bag. The gunmen seem to know the fault lines beneath the surface, the genes beneath the cheek bones
Remember Alex,

SONG

It's exciting, Alex said, when a map burns, first the paper turns red, it blackens and curls. You can just make out a road, a bridge, a railway line, a name, then it chars and fades. The boy said: the mapmakers are old men, their pens pry into our families, sparing no one, and then the soldiers without uniforms come looking for our fathers, for our brothers, the fields are mined and the bridges sag over the river on their piles and the people flee. The refugees are turned back at the frontiers, their passports invalid in the new dispensation. I said to myself: since we cannot live together, let us destroy the maps and begin again. When the room filled with smoke and the towns were destroyed one by one, I was glad, and said to myself: let us begin again by forging a clean country for a pure people. We cannot live in one another's sight' so let there be cantons, and well live back to back, let our villages be nameless, and let our people grow like apple trees with blank minds Alex said: my brother died in a drain outside Vukovar, his orders were to fire

The peacock finds food,

A sputtering truck backs up To the door of a red farm shed. Much-crusted legs just and splay At brittle graceless angles and Huge here and there eyes Flash glassy as navy marbles between gaps in the wooden slats. This one is hoiked up by the legs. Her slack belly settles And spreads its matted breadth Across two other heads.

1 send a message: 'Come my darling a rose is blooming in my garden. I can't pick it. A nightingale is singing on the rose. I can't hear it.

I can't come my darling, Sky News pummels the room With smuggled footage. A trailer Of villagers fractioned into bits Of gristle and dangling sandals. A mess of shattered Kosovars Gathered in heaps on the cattle cars. for another year. The empty roads from Rumelija are closed. Sender Bey has closed them. We are dying from sorrow.'

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- Mary

O'Donoghue

- Anon, Trans Patrick Early.

PRAGUE
When the rain comes it soaks the rocks black and leathers barbarian faces stains seep in wooden floors, strollers stand in doorways and watch wet passers,

POEM
some of whom act as if there was no rain, clothes drenched, yet outwardly indifferent, knowing the sun will soon steam it all away. - Michael S .Begnal

the Headmaster said,

we are each of us bom under a different sign the cross and the crescent are only the most obvious, hut there are finer distinctions, between crosses for instance. We should be on our guard and prepared to defend our brothers

The Contributors
Patrick Early is a poet and writer living in Clare. Educated in languages at Cambridge, Leeds and Essex, his poems and reviews have appeared in New Departures, The Honest Ulsterman, the Bellingdam Review and the Cork Literary Review. Mary O'Donoghue lives in Galway and has published in The Cuirt Journal and The Tuam Herald. Michael S Begnal is co-editor of The Burning Bush and lives in Galway. He has read at the 'Lunch on The Island' readings at Canavan House, Nuns Island. Submissions for ' M A R K I N G S ' should be sent to Fred Johnston, c/o The Galway Advertiser, Church Lane, Shop Street, Galway.

and now that my heart is reduced to ash, I would like to be born again into a country without tears. ck Early