Kevin Wade’s haunting yet lyrical keyboards accompany my poem 'Centenary,' the final poem in my Easter Rising triptych. We recorded this track a year before the 1916 centenary at Silverwood Studios in Wicklow, as part of the session for my first album, Embers and Earth.
In an instance of the call of duty being answered above and beyond itself, Kevin composed a sterling piece of music to go with my poem, which, as its title suggests, is a meditation on the centenary and what I believe to be the failure of the Irish State in its current guise to adequately meet the standards for nationhood extolled by the Proclamation:
Centenary
And everywhere
The sick glorification of failure.
- Michael O’Loughlin
Are you coming along to the parade
that haemorrhages at the GPO’s granite
like the blood rinsing their uniforms,
tried-and-true disciples of April? I won’t be there.
The flag droops like a stale leaf,
drumfire percussion attends the soldiers’
goose-steps, crack, crack, crack-crack-crack
along big-smoke Parnell Square.
Flying low by O’ Connell Street, Air Corps
planes belch white smoky tentacles
as the rooftop statues beat their chests
in time to ruffle and flourish,
every window open as a wound
and rinsed by the forced solemnity,
the armoured cars legion as cannon fodder,
the wreath fanged as a body-grip,
the VIP section reserved for hated dignitaries,
their wilful reflective silence,
the bugled pantomime of pride.
Under a flagstaff in the Stone Breakers’ yard,
pageantry glazes the rebels’ names,
the very names given to streets,
high-risers, DART stations, scratched
on the Proclamation, inked as one, fossilised
as the bullet-holes studding the Ionic portico,
drab medals brought out once more
to bring a sliver of radiance to the sunless eye.
Their ghosts still insist on our fealty.
Ancient warriors live and die
by articles of brotherhood and overthrow,
but polished society reads the work
of armed insurgents
first as threat, then as bravery.
The Proclamation is a howl for blood
now proudly intoned by lip-servers
who knew neither gunfire nor the filth
of tenements,
masquerading as revolutionaries,
who live on photo-ops and state pensions
going through the handed-down ritual,
mouthing rhetoric of sacrifice and spectacle,
secretly convinced glory still rests
in bullets rushing to greet them
and holiness in their tribal fortune,
inheritors of a hallowed pipe dream.
So let it finish here, this death-watching pageant.
The sun still works its weathering sorcery on the Spire.
Let pedestals crack where a traitor is branded.
Let the ghosts shambling through green light be given up.
Let the book finish. Let the blood finally rinse off.
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