Aoife's blog: Poetry Inspired By RSC
January 27, 2011
Here's two poems I've written inspired by going to see the RSC's productions of Julius Caesar and As You Like It at the Roundhouse. The third poem I wrote for the BBC World Service's World Today programme and the title is a quote from Mark Anthony's famous speech 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen lend me your ears.' It was broadcast on Saturday, January 22nd, 2011.
Julius
Wolf brothers howl at murder
as petals of blood flutter
across a great city.
The ides of march creeps closer
in the blindness of arrogance
as honourable men plot
their suicides as if this storm
held back the flash of a lion's claw
ripping open a night that promises
the price of freedom is too expensive
for prophecy. Propaganda spins
the heads or tails of betrayal
that cannot be buried.
Open wounds whisper
of dreams reinterpreted,
friendship as an infamous question mark.
How quickly the streets are made of knifes,
an echo of steel that bleeds through history,
the mystery of how each cut becomes
the ancient source of our scarlet rivers.
by Aoife Mannix
As You Like It
Love scrawled as cardboard graffiti
hung around the necks of trees
that sing the nonsense of romance
as the fool falls for white stilettos.
Melancholy is an ageing ginger rock star
who courts our laughter with desperate chords
that hide the truth of a bloody handkerchief
as if the heart must always go in disguise.
Lines between girl and boy are easily
crossed when time is not what it seems.
Nobody dies for love yet the forest
bleeds from the games lovers love to play.
by Aoife Mannix
'So Are They All; All Honourable Men'
Who would you trust with your daughter, Tony or Berlusconi?
Italian girls doing twirls as sexy cops sucking on lollipops
or sexed up reports that can't be heard in courts because
they threaten national security. Moral impurity so shocking
the Pope can't cope, secret communications between nations,
prostitutes dressed as nurses, the curses of soldiers injured
in Iraq. An attack on common decency or could it be
as they claim we're all the same, just searching for honesty
and love. Far above any petty law breaking, soul faking,
lie making, shrouded in political secrecy, but like you and me,
decent, sincere folk who'd never joke about weapons
of mass destruction, the obstruction of justice and truth.
Men who wouldn't be so uncouth as to betray
their committed relationship to democracy
but honourable politicians hounded by false charges
of hypocrisy. Why make such a fuss when
what we don't know won't ever hurt us?
By Aoife Mannix
by Aoife Mannix
| No comments yet
Share this