AIRPORT
After the Report of the Mahon Tribunal
What you have heard is true.
But don’t let them cry out
as we leave.
Don’t spare them indignation and disgust
as we depart.
For the television news.
Don’t even let them shake their heads.
They didn’t shake their heads
when we were shaking ours.
And I will do them a deal.
Here in the concourse as we go;
if they will not speak of me,
will not put me on the news as if,
I were their concern.
Let us deal. Let us be done.
Then I’ll be off. Shake. Here.
I have spat in my hand.
Joe Horgan is a past winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the author of two books. He has also written a weekly column for the Irish Post for thirteen years.
Latest posts by Joe Horgan (see all)
- Our ‘Profound Indifference’ Towards Asylum Seekers? - March 28, 2013
- Enough of Apps - November 21, 2012
- The Gathering, Mr Varadkar, The Gathering - November 16, 2012
- Mike Murphy and the Casual Arrogance of Media Complicity - April 18, 2012
- You Couldn’t Make It Up - April 16, 2012
April 14, 2012 7:14 pm
Did James Joyce write the following?
“When the Irishman is found outside of Ireland in another environment, he very often becomes a respected man. The economic and intellectual conditions that prevail in his own country do not permit the development of individuality. No one who has any self-respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.”
The press, the airwaves, the courts, the Net: we must use every avenue for reform. We must pester and we must inspire our politicians. We must not be silent. Again and again, we must struggle to forgive but not to forget, to learn and to share our lessons, to love, and to remember that the measure of Love is to love without measure. We must take our anger, our outrage and our indignation, and we must seek to use it to best effect. We must continue to draw inspiration from every possible source.We must “be the change we wish to see in the world.” We must not give in to despair. If we assert that all humans are equal,if only as souls, we must struggle to best express how, and struggle with how all humanity may express itself best. “Democracy” – Enlightenment – IS coming: every one of us is helping give it birth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t2uemFNcwk
Did Abraham Lincoln write the following, and deliver it at Gettysburg?
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Tom Kelly, Escondido, California.