By Randall Stephen Hall ©
https://soundcloud.com/hugh-midden-speaks/crazy-paving-17-6-15
If the web link doesn’t click just cut and paste it into your web browser. Thanks.
We are all cracked and broken.
Not one of us, a perfect thing.
The crazy paving of our wee country
Is all smashed and badly laid.
God said, he liked it like that.
(He’s some boy, is our Lord.
Can do what he fuckin’ likes.
Like ridin’ his trike
Through your painting
Without any notice
And with such rough tyres.)
Our badly laid slabs
Are all parched now
For the want of rain
To wash all our colours away
And reveal our completeness.
But that rainfall may never come.
Not one drop . . .
Instead we have to endure
That shower of manure.
It only rains over there
On that hill
And only for them.
For the water has yet to trickle down
To us.
Ach well . . .
That shower . . .
Him, her, you and me can see
That we need Barra
To read us
A new weather forecast.
Our smashed and broken fields
Like an unruly blanket.
Protesting, stubbornly, to the sky.
Waiting for something different.
For the rain
That will make every dam burst
And break.
Make the ground shake and quiver.
Make us shudder and afeared.
Only then will our fields change.
Once upon a time
All Ireland was green and flat.
But God, put a stop to all that
Flat way of thinking.
“Only green? Only green?”, he thought.
So he took up his sledgehammer
And smashed us all up
To start again.
He knew that only green would never do.
You see?
He grinned at the mess
That he had created.
The devastation
And the perverse deviation.
It was the child in him
That made mountains
Out of cardboard boxes
(We only use mole hills here).
Rivers out of silver paper
And clouds from the white hairs
Of his pet Scottie.
Just another bloody wee Westie.
And all before his mammie said
“Come in for yer tea God
Or I’ll skelp yer arse!”
Comments are closed.