Notes
In these hard days for so many who knows any longer “how it will all end”?
…it wasn’t much better in the 30’s for a poet like César Vallejo watching the rot of fascism eat away a Europe long fattened on the contradictions of enormous wealth and immeasurable poverty. Much the human story… Vallejo’s poem ‘Piedra Negra sobre una Piedra Blanca’ ends with the lines:
“witnesses are / the Thursdays and the humerus bones, / the loneliness, the rain, the roads…”
For a poet with a heart as wide as Vallejo’s this world must have been close to the Hell it has become for so many people since… the plague of poverty and inhumanity a daily war once cleverly concealed beneath the mask of business-as-usual; now, perhaps, in this time of Plague, that mask is slipping with nature’s ‘revenge’ on the centuries of human arrogance and greed where so many of us are being ‘asked’ to die abandoned in army tents or isolated in lonely rooms only to have our bodies either neatly wrapped in cellophane left lying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P637eJGbo80) on the streets or carted away by the military (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGvMq00k3c) for a business-like funeral…
For want of better world… always for want of a better world…
Short Bio:
Séamas Carraher lives in Dublin, Ireland and works with homeless street drinkers. His poetry has appeared in a number of online and print journals. Recent work, (both poetry and non-fiction), have been published at https://www.globalrights.info/?s=seamas+carraher. Links to other poems can be found at http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/. He wants to believe that our voices raised, both individually and collectively, can become a map to a better, truly human, world.
