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Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos. 17.

“See you and Self Esteem big lad!”

When the recent flag protests erupted in Belfast in December 2012 I was angry and annoyed. The middle class part of me was quite dismissive of the first protest at the city hall. Part of me found it ridiculous, even funny at times. Yet the other part “the worker” in me, didn’t find it funny at all.

This deeper part felt sad. Felt sad that some people, in East Belfast, were prepared to make them selves look so stupid, on the media, on the radio and in the newspapers, over a flag. Now what do I mean by “stupid”? What am I saying here? Am I just being critical? No. Am I saying that the flag protesters were totally wrong? No, I’m not saying that either.

The flag protesters were making a very valid point, and expressing themselves strongly, in some ways, for the right reasons. But they had reached this point in their lives and in the history of Ulster, Northern Ireland, the Six Counties, “Norn Iron”, for the wrong reasons and over hundreds of years.

They had reached such a low point that they were allowing this situation and the media to make them seem, merely inarticulate, violent and protesting for no real reason at all. Now, anyone can see that there was something to be said here and there were genuine grievances amongst parts of this community. However, the route taken, the methods and tactics adopted, the means of expression used, were all going to amount to one thing. Looking “stupid”, both locally and to the eyes of the world press.

Like a form of public self harm.

If, every time, you don’t get what you want, you riot, and damage the fabric and infrastructure of your own community, the only person or group to blame for this is yourself, and for the future loss of jobs, shops, facilities, investment and most of all, the respect from others, for who you are, as people.

After doing this hundreds of times over the past forty years, you also seem like a ONE TRICK PONY. (“Not gettin’ my stuff! . . . Riot!”) As predictable as a child without real and caring parents.

How did “Loyalism” develop?

While all was well economically, in the North of Ireland, during the height of the industrial period, the Protestant workers, in general, (an inadequate term), remained true to what they were being told, to be true to. This is a universal experience, not just something particular to Northern Ireland.

There isn’t one Protestant worker, now, or in the past 400 years, who invented “Loyalism”. It was invented for them by their employers. It didn’t grow out of Northern Protestant stock like the buds, leaves and branches of some wonder tree.

If “Loyalism” was ever a young sapling it developed and grew into this unusually contorted shape out of self preservation and the need to obey its betters. In order to stay safe, keep your family and friends safe and then to prosper, safely. To obey and fit in, was everything in Belfast, for everyone in the city. For all around the emerging work force in Belfast were the constant reminders of what would happen if you tried to buck the system.

Violence, and the threat of violence prevailed, as ever, from the early beginnings of Belfast to the present day and you could argue that even Sir Arthur Chichester himself, is a prime example of a person who knew how to use violence, power and control to shape things, and to establish himself within this situation.

We walk down streets named after him in the centre of Belfast, yet most of us know very little about him or about some of the violence that he employed, throughout his time in Ireland as Lord Deputy, and the advantage he took from his role, to gain title, position and wealth.

As I have said before, fear and the abuse of fear, within our population, always has been the major factor in political and social unrest. If there was no fear, no division amongst us, there would be no conflict. There would be no Troubles.

How do you take away the fear? The fear that continues to stand over us like Goliath and Samson? How do you convert the fear into friendship? How do you transform the users of fear and violence into active participating citizens? What makes them use fear and violence in the first place? Is it purely for money and status? For Bling? Is it just an engrained part of our culture? Are some people just addicted to violence? Wired for it? Are some of us violent due to mental health issues?

Did you know that Northern Ireland is the biggest user of prescribed anti-depressants in all of Europe?

People can change and evolve, but is it only through the intervention of money? Is that all there is? Do we all just jump to money? Are we not motivated by compassion in disasters? Think of the serious amounts of money we give to charities. Do we not make sacrifices as warriors in wars for others? Think of your bravery. If these are not the heights that can be climbed by the human spirit elsewhere, why can’t we climb them in Belfast?

“Can’t be arsed big lad.” Could be one reply. “Nah, son, you and yer middle class, wishy washy, do-gooder thinkin’ isn’t for the likes of us. We like it this way. We don’t want to change. Here . . . give us one o’ yer chips, mucker. Ah, magic, sunshine. Now, yer talkin’. Happy Days . . .”

If that was the case then all the good, decent people, on both sides of the community wouldn’t have worked so hard, without any income, to do so much for peace, in Belfast. So I’m certain that we don’t all just “jump to money” after all.

Yet, why is it that a small minority can use a flag like a threat? How can a small minority abuse our citizens, wreck our streets, threaten shop owners, extract money illegally with threats, while pretending that it is all about loyalty, when it is more to do with control?

There are so many industrious people here, giving their time for the good of their own community. Isn’t it time we dug up our own sense of community and self respect from the rubble and the ashes, created by the few of us “who can’t be arsed” to change?

The Citizen Ship.
Belfast 2013. Nos 17.
By Randall Stephen Hall ©
15.5.13

www.randallstephenhall.com

Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos. 16.

I’m working through my thoughts upon symbols, emblems and issues of identity, sparked off by the Flag Protests of late 2012/2013. Each article, poem and picture offers something towards a solution. As free expression isn’t part of our culture, while keeping your head down and saying nothing is, I offer these little thoughts up to the few, who have the ears and interest to listen.

The Wonder of Samson & Goliath.

When I was a boy, growing up in Belfast, they built two big cranes, to help build ships in Belfast. I could see them every day from my bedroom window.

The first to be built was Goliath in 1969 and the second was Samson, built in 1974. It seems kind of ironic to me, that the shipyard should choose, firstly the name of a big Biblical giant, a big rough and violent Philistine, brought low by David and a single stone, fired from a sling shot. It seems doubly ironic that the ship yard should call their second crane Samson, another Biblical figure who lost his strength through betrayal and the cutting of his long hair.

They say you get a good view of the city from up there, when you are on top. These two cranes dominate the skyline, yet even with all their hugeness, they are still only a small part of the city. For in effect, the city dwarfs them, with all its streets, avenues, motorways and cul de sacs.

In Belfast, the people can move about and go anywhere they want to go. In theory, you could walk around, almost anywhere in safety. What is it then, that prevents us from doing just that, even now?

For Samson and Goliath, they too have certain limitations as to where they can and cannot go. They were created to provide a certain service, to help build ships, to be the workers strength, to amplify what they could not collectively do themselves.

These two cranes stand now, like monuments to a lost industry. They stand like redundant workers once did, on street corners, waiting to be employed. These two cranes, with such potential to lift the heaviest of objects, can only go where they are allowed to go. They can only move upon the tracks created for them. To do the bidding of others, their makers, and those who once employed them.

So as awesome as these two cranes seem, they are vulnerable to anyone who might de-rail them or block their movement. It is sad to see these metal ghosts, hanging around in Belfast, when they could be doing what they do best, in a ship building yard in China, the far East or some other country, still alive with a ship building industry.

All the industry that we once took for granted here, over a hundred years ago, has almost gone. The cotton mills, the linen bleaching greens, the metal fabrication factories, the rope factories, shirt factories, the ship building yards and all the rest, have gone silent. Run down. All over Ulster the ruins of these places stand witness to change. To loss. That means pain, loss of income, the destruction of communities, migration and the loss of self esteem, when you don’t have work. It removes you from your sense of self.

This general loss, this deep social trauma was happening at the same time as the start of our current Troubles. Yet the media focused far less on this than they ever did on our violent selves. This quiet continous erosion advanced as deliberately as the the glaciers that once shaped this land. Grinding our mountains to dust and creating rich fields from the debris. The Troubles have done that to us as well. For most of us the result has been the wearing away of distorted thinking, the beginning of the end of sectarianism and the opening up of other possibilities. New soil, new fields and new openings to link them, together.

Like the scooped out husk of a fairground coconut, all our major industries, in Ulster, were either sold off, shut down, or moved to countries like India and other exotic places where labour was considerably cheaper. Who was responsible for this? Where did the money go? And where does it reside today?

The people who ran and managed our lives as workers, played lip service to “loyalty”, while all the time organising their own futures, after the last World War, in factories elsewhere, in other countries with other workers, for whom they had to create a new language, new symbols, deal with different politics and move on, for purely commercial reasons.

Sadly, they left the fabric and ideas of “loyalty” behind them, so deeply imprinted on their workers hearts, that we are now caught on the old barbed wire of abandonment. The broken biscuits, the twisted metal, the lost love, and the never talked about, sense of betrayal by our industrial masters. We are still caught on this sharp rusted metal, like the false teeth of an old guard dog. The dog has gone, these long years, but the teeth remain.

And where do you hang your cracked cup if it has no handle?

Last of all, our tattered and torn Union flag flaps from many lamp posts in the saddest of ways, for this is no celebration of identity. This is a “Keep Out!” sign, put there by the smallest of monorities. This flag, to many, once meant that we were loved. That someone cared about us, stuck out here in an unfamiliar land, so far from our imagined home. This symbol of the Union flag now seems to be under attack, to this minority, still under siege, but only in their minds.

So to understand all their journey, rather than just their journey over the months of the flag protests, is to understand and feel their deep bereavement for a dead industry, the loss of an “industrialsed culture”, a failed, two sided politics, and the misguided actions, pain and anguish of a people, utterly lost. However, I include myself in this too, and the whole of our community in Northern Ireland. For this loss has affected us all, not just one small part of it.

Sympathy and understanding should really be the tools we are reaching for, rather than ridicule and the middle class morphine of disengagement. To laugh at those with far less advantage, and less opportunity is just to make matters worse, for where is your solution?

The fear of the gigantic philistine still flies from our lamp posts. A material reminder of the days when we had to keep our heads down and just say nothing. When are we all going to realize that those days are over?

The Citizen Ship.
Belfast. Nos 16.
By Randall Stephen Hall ©
15.5.13
www.randallstephenhall.com

Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos 15.

The Flag issue continues and God, I could do with a break from the po-faced seriousness of it all.

This surreal poem is dedicated to Spike Milligan, a man who thought of himself as Irish, yet whose humour was seen as British. Either way, humour is humour, so long as it makes you laugh.

It should be read in the voice of Noel Coward . . . while smoking a cigarette, in a long handled holder, and perhaps, wearing a dressing gown and monocle.

The Ugly Violent Ogre.

The ugly violent ogre, and his mates,
Approached me with all the violence
Of a badly written political speech.
Carrying his words like a clumsily made club
Spiked, with nails.
The club inscribed with the words
Love and hate.
(He was obviously a moderate.)

What could I do?
I only had a single pebble.
Picked up from off
The troubled rocky shores
Of this, my island.

Loading it quickly
Into my long barrelled rifle,
(For I had forgotten my sling-shot).
I fired . . .
And, lo and behold
I shot the ugly and violent ogre
Fair and square
Between his broadly spread eyes,
(It seemed obvious to me that he was of Saxon origin.)

Although I had shot him completely though the brain,
Still, he kept coming.
(His secondary brain, must have been else where).
He rumbled towards me,
Beseeching me in the vernacular . . .

“Fuh-Queue! Fuh-Queue!”
He sang, pointing at a burning bus
Which failed to stop at the pavement.
“Fuh-Queue! Fuh-Queue!”he responded.
Irate (not an Arab state),
Jumping up and down, while waving
What looked like a bus time table at me.
All the time getting closer . . .

One shot and two shots more.
You could have hit him
Like a tractor driving through a barn door.
But still he kept coming,
His head now trailing smoke
Like a burning kebab.
Waving his flag at me.
Shouting threats and insults.
With his head now, half wrapped
In a pair of flag underpants.

The smell was atrocious
And I didn’t know where to look.
(You don’t get this kind of thing
In Marks Spencer).

I shot his ears clean off
With the next two shots,
When I remembered that originally
I had loaded my rifle,
With only one pebble.
“A miracle!” I thought,
Or suspended disbelief.

I pondered briefly on the odds,
The variables and the chances of this
Happening.
Yet still he came on.
Closer and closer.
Thundering like an out of control
Sylvester Stallone with a bad script.
(Well, that’s red meat for you.)

I continued to fire imaginery pebbles
At this bloody, ugly and violent ogre
Until, eventually he thundered
To an abrupt halt
Having offered him a cigarette,
A Chinese take away
And a six pack of Harp.

He consumed the lot,
Burped, farted, and instantly died
From excessive consumerism.
It was ghastly, and a needless waste
Of tax payer’s money.
Never mind the strain
On the health service.

This only goes to show you
That, with a good aim
And the right ammunition
You can fell any bloody nightmare
From two hundred paces.

Good evening . . .

By Randall Stephen Hall
7th May 2013 ©
www.randallstephenhall.com

Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos 14.
As a response to the recent Flags issue, I collect ideas and write them down. To celebrate with words, democracy, and the expressive rights of the citizen in Northern Ireland.

The Old Darkness.

The old darkness
Descends upon us once again.
With the fear in the stomach
And the nervous look
Over the shoulder.
The sleepness night,
Wakeful, at unpredictable sounds.

The old darkness,
Wraps itself around and around
Our vulnerable minds,
As subtle and frightening
As an unseen incantation.
This darkness enfolds us,
Wraps us once more,
Cradles us, like tortured babies,
In its deep, horrific magic.

The old darkness,
A dark blanket of protest,
Infests us all as surely as
The cockroach beetle.
Disgusting to the touch
And even uglier in flight.
The spawn of second hand, whispered ideas,
And shadowy loiterings.
The passing on of the plague,
And promise, from one to another.

The old agrarian, secretive, sectarian, sham.
Replanted in concrete for city slickers.
Our blocked dam in a silent valley.
Where no one speaks.
Where everyone still, keeps their heads down.
While the two sides row
Someone else’s boat, through choppy waters
Once again.

The old darkness.
The fear in our selves,
Laid bare, laid out, laid open
To those who would serve
The darkness.
The shadow self, unable to bear
The light of new ideas, it seeks out the shadows of others.
Can only function, in the soft warm corners of ourselves.
It rides on the shoulders of marchers,
Trails the coat tails of rioters.
Corrupts the minds of the weak and the greedy,
And is the life coach to the floundering.

The old darkness descends
But cannot bear love, cannot be in the company
Of those who give of themselves and their time
To others, for free.

It seeks out the easy prey
As the darkness settles, at the end of each day.
As surely as a ready meal fails to satisfy.
It can only deal in the fast food
And simple ideas, found on the street.
No salad, no fibre, no fear, I swear.
As easy to digest as beef with fries
In your bap, with worms, it tells you lies.
The con, the trick, the lack of nutrition
From a flag, in a bag,
You’ve no bloody mission.

Your political belly sags
As you drag yourself along.
As you wrap yourself in polythene colours.
The duller and dumber,
And dumbed down you become.
The more you are at risk,
You could succumb, to the fist,
To the big red hand and its one big thumb,
Pressing down.
Pressing down.

Which red hand?
Whose red hand?
Yellow or white?
Check the menu mate.
There’s a special deal on tonight . . .
With a two red hand special.
You wrestle with words.
Can you read the menu?
Sectarian, from no choices.
No one hears your volatile voices.
They only rattle their tin,
For your money.

The old darkness descends
But fails, as it always has failed,
To snuff out your light, completely.
Invested with love, care and patience.
The touch that only a mother
Could describe and carry, to her children,
Still exists.
Deep within your culture,
She rests there yet, with two clenched fists.
To care for you, and you.
Her small, hurt family.

The flag maker, makes the flags.
What does the flag maker make,
From making you make others
Make a mountain from a mole hill?

The old darkness recedes
As the dawn recycles itself,
Like the sound of glass bottles
Falling into a skip.

By Randall Stephen Hall
7th May 2013 ©
www.randallstephenhall.com

Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos 13.

Flags and ashes.

The Flag Issue in Belfast continues
To stand on our street corners.
Continues to stand on our hopes and our children’s hopes.
Continues to hang out from our lamp posts: to chill.
To chill the hearts of the optimistic and the bold.
To narrow our gaze and freeze our pipes.
The ones that should be channelling peace.

The Flag issue blocks up our windows
With twisted, bitter nails
Like a cowboy builder.
Shutters our broad minds.
All hail the victor, all hail to violence,
And the shadow that walks behind it,
Scattering lottery tickets, beer mats
And fag ash, like confetti.

The Flag issue stops up our mouths
With old rolled newspapers,
Stained with the fish n’ chip saliva.
The salty, drugged, burger meat
Of hard boys, failing to be men.

The Flag issue, issues forth
Like dark smoke from burning tyres.
Screeching hard and coming up to stop.
Unable to deal with Green Issues.
Polluting our lungs, still bursting for peace,
With fear, violence and intimidation.
All part of our culture.
What culture?
This culture?

The Flag issue hangs over Belfast
Like the gloom of dispair itself.
A heavy cloud that won’t go away,
Until it gets the cash in a brown envelope.
Then and only then, will it take the money
To the pub, down the road,
Rather than to the community centre.

Our children, our communities, our reason,
Loses out again.

The Flag issue, attempts to issue orders
from lamp posts.
Screams like a Banshee, giving notice.
These flags,
Like deflated clown costumes.
I don’t get the joke,
And where’s the custard pie?

Looking high at the blue skys of Ulster
I see only rage, made from bright colours.
That would smother democracy
Along with my neighbours, in my neighbourhood.
While hoddies, like monkeys, beyond the Emerald city,
Dance on thin disenfranchised ladders, hiding their faces.
Carrying out the orders of the less able.
To wobble on their vertigo.

They grapple with these flags in the breeze,
While on their knees, to the needs of others.
Those who would drag us all down,
To the level of a painted kerb stone.

The Flag issue pounds upon our senses
Like a First World War gun.
With only one redundant idea.
One redundant idea!
One redundant idea!
Again and again and again,
That, hard men should be an example to our
Uncorrupted children.

One, redundant idea.
Doesn’t make a culture.
One weak and sickly concept
Will not feed a child, provide jobs
Or nourish any community’s ambitions.
This low grade meat is a confidence trick,
To the poor and needy.
Who seek self esteem
Like a one million pound roll over.

Feed me love and friendship
Feed me new horizons.
Feed me new colours, dancing across the city.
Feed me love, don’t feed me pity.

By Randall Stephen Hall
7th of May 2013. ©

www.randallstephenhall.com

Citizen Ship 2013. Belfast. Nos 12.
Words from the Narrow Road.

The Flag Issue continues to squeeze out its bitter juice of protest.

While much of the street protests have disappeared back through the front doors, into the houses and communities of East Belfast, the opposition to change, around symbols, still remains. This opposition sulks and chews on old bones like an ageing White Bull Dog, growling when approached, scarred with old wounds, won for, and on behalf of, its master.

But this old brutalized dog rarely sees its master any more or hears its master’s voice. It couldn’t tell you the name of its master, for its master rarely visits to shake a paw and say well done. So the old dog, shrugs and dreams by the fire, of times long gone, when it was young and vibrant and proud. Loyal to its master, like all good dogs should be. Prepared to lay down its life, its very being, for its master’s cause.

What is that cause today, in 2013 ?

In order to understand this old, sometimes aggressive dog we need to understand its existence from the beginning . . . What gave birth to such raw emotions, and to such violent (non peaceful) street “protest” at the end of 2012, especially in East Belfast?

Industrial Beginnings.

As Belfast grew in the early industrial age, people flooded into, what was then, a town, busy with activity. They were looking for jobs, something to sustain themselves and their families.

Many of these people, came to Belfast, like refugees from the country (and some were refugees from other countries too). The changes in the countryside, including farming methods and the falling away of slower working practices, left many unskilled farm labourers out of a job. This coincided with the growth of industry in the city, a common experience in major cities like Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin and Manchester.

The first thing these migrants found were difficult and squalid living conditions. The people who employed them (including their children), did so to benefit from their labour, and it is from that profit that large elegant houses began to be built in the areas we now associate with accumulated wealth not far from the streets of East Belfast itself in County Down and beyond.

(County Down has always been an ancient seat of power, as far back as the Normans, back further to the monk, Columbanus, Bangor and back further still, to the times of Saint Patrick.)

It is money, combined with industrial innovation that created wealth, that created change, that created economic growth of astounding levels, in Belfast, for the factory owners and businessmen in the second half of the 19th century. It is also the major factor that created a sense of loyalty to the British Empire among many in the Protestant work force, as everything material, in Belfast, seemed to be on the rise, even the perceived sense of improvement, for most Protestant workers.

Was this perception accurate, relative to how they once had lived in the country?

As the industrialists created employment and personal wealth at a scale, never before achieved, the worker’s living conditions and their material prospects bore little resemblance to that of their employer’s accumulated wealth.

One small problem.

How were the industrialists, the factory owners and the wealthy to keep their workers focused on the job in hand, keep their heads down, and their minds trained on something that would keep them continually distracted over the next century? By being divisive, while rewarding loyalty with large crumbs for the industrial Protestants, while other Catholic members of the population just received crumbs this collective workforce was kept divided..

What’s the difference between “large crumbs” and just “crumbs”? Probably, very little.

Belfast just happened to be in the right place geographically, to take advantage of the water power cascading down from the upper slopes of Divis, Black Mountain, the Cavehill and all the other hills that create the rim edge of the Belfast Basin and Lough Lea (Belfast Lough). Combined with other natural resources, expanding docks and space for ship building, metal fabrication and agricultural export. Belfast’s growth could not be stopped.

As a city it rapidly eclipsed Dublin as an industrial force. A northern hammer to Dublin’s cultured, but overpopulated, streets. Yet the two cities had much in common. Both were centres of British administration, exhibiting the pomp and circumstance of empire through their many fine buildings. Both displayed elements of soft Irishness, through symbols within their architecture, while both did little to eleviate the poverty, disease, and unhealthy, cramped living conditions of their workers.

It was within these narrow streets of Belfast, amongst the homes of relatively poor Protestant and Catholic workers, that the seeds of old agrarian hatreds were to be planted.

These seeds were to flourish and grow in the hot damp mills, the shop floor of the textile factories, the ship building yards and even the Civil Service,banks, churches and schools which were all to be so easily infected by the disease of the mind known as sectarianism.

Who planted these seeds in the first place? Individuals? Groups? Organisations? Local government, administration? Did we all take part in the great planting? If we feel we didn’t take part, have we all been affected?

I think that to feel set apart from the sectarianism of the Troubles is to deny the reality that it was, and still is, a social, religious, financial and educational plague that has affected us all.

The need therefore, for a symbol we can all relate to in Belfast, seems like a very, late in the day “No Brainer”.

Citizen Ship 2013. Nos 11. Where’s the Love?

The Flag Issue continues to smoulder like the remains of an old bonfire on a wet day. We all have different ideas about this one issue. They are as varied as the discarded beer tins, fag packets and rubbish, left behind, after such an event. But I would argue that the silent majority in Northern Ireland (like your granny, the quiet family who live next door or all law abiding citizens) would rather that flags, in general, were not hung from lamp posts.

I remember bonfires from a more innocent time, walking through the streets of Belfast, one balmy evening, with my parents. This was almost fifty years ago. They were exciting and colourful to a young child’s eyes.

I was out for a walk this afternoon beneath manys a flag, looking at the beginnings of a bonfire, to be burned in July. I just don’t get it? I don’t think I ever will get it? For a Union flag, hung legally in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff or Glasgow, means something quite different to a Union flag, attached to a lamp post over here.

To me (and I can only comment for myself, here) they scream fear, violence and intimidation. They shout intolerance, lack of education and indoctrination. They gaulder lack of opportunity, social degeneration and hatred. They cry out political abandonment, deprivation and greed.

These local Union flags (as opposed to the “one” that hangs at Buckingham Palace) seem neither benign, attractive or positive. They haven’t been placed there as part of any local government policy. In fact they are the complete reverse of current local council policy throughout Northern Ireland, which is “No flags or a civic flag”. These flags, hung there, without permission, without any democratic consensus are a threatening eyesore to any peaceful local or passing tourist.

What would the Queen think of this? What would Shakespeare, Robin Hood, Drake, Raleigh, Nelson, Edward Carson, General Montgomery or Blair Mayne think of this? (to name, but a few British cultural icons and perceived heroes from the past)

Will this ever change? Is this about local politics, democracy or the rights of the individual? Absolutely not. It is very much about the attempt to threaten, make fearful and browbeat the individual law abiding citizen.

What has that to do with Democracy, Unionism or even basic Christianity?

The intensity around the flag reveals the cavernous loss of identity amongst many in the Protestant community. However, with many who don’t attend church, with many who have no Christian belief system, how can they be described as Protestants other than by being actively involved in “Protest” ?

If all a community has to offer, as its social standard bearer, is fear, violence and intimidation, then the community, as a whole, is in deep crisis.

Here’s another poem from the 1998 “Dam Bursting“ collection.

Waiting for the lights to change.

Waiting for the lights to change,
I stood watching the other side.
The soldiers,
In their camouflage green.
So out of place,
Set against the drab grey palette of the city.

Fresh to my eyes, an echo of many more
Young soldiers, such as these.
From a time before the great watershed of
The Ceasefire,
When they flew about us
Like sea gulls at a city dump.
The Roman Guard at a northern Golgotha.

Two police landrovers beetle past,
Rocking from side to side, as they do.
A blue lamp bumper car, in an unhappy arcade.
Entering my vision briefly.
A walk on part for my front seat, at the lights.
Waiting for the lights to change.

And then I notice the man with his dogs.
Moving forward, stepping out.
His Doc Marten slabs, throwing me a clue.
A pointer to his status, as,
The man with his two dogs,
Not poodles ?
Oh no.
Not fluffy Chiwawas?
Catch yerself on.
Not box trimmed Scotties?
Go feel yer head!
But “Pit Bulls” of a variety
My daughter thinks they’re cute.
And they are, with their own chunky charm.

Snug, compact, secure and hard.
Rocking from side to side, as they do.
Waddling forward, tongues in rasping mouths.
Separated by their master.
Attempting to talk to each other
In between their heavy breaths.
Across the flesh and bone
Of their masters legs.

His relationship with his dogs
Hand in glove, made for each other.
Which came first, I ask myself,
This chicken or this egg ?
Separation impossible.
Egg and yolk , cemented in one hard shell.
Dog, Master, Dog.
Dog, Master, Dog.
He divides to master.

These three in one, welded together.
Affirmation of existence.
“ Here I am! “ he speaks, without words.
“ Don’t mess with me ! “ he broadcasts to the world, and East Belfast.
“ Play with me and my dogs play with you, mate! “

The lights finally changed and we passed each other
On the middle ground, at the crossing.
Going in our own different directions.
He with his boots, baseball cap and dogs,
And me, out with my notepad.
Taking my pen for a walk.
Observing, watching.
Waiting for the lights to change.

I passed the first soldier,
Briefly making eye contact.
Wanting to say hello
But not finding the air in my lungs.

My mouth, mouthing hello in the dry air
To the second soldier who hurried past,
In search of his partners back.
I had reached my destination
And the automatic doors sucked me in
To wait for the train up the coast.
Fleeing once more to the more neutral
Bunkerville.

The lights had changed and with it came
Another snapshot of alternate existence.
Different points of view
Going in different directions.
But thank God I wasn’t born a Pit Bull.
Thank God I can wield this pen
And think beyond my masters
Knee or cap.

Yet, I still wait for those lights to change.

Written by,
Randall Stephen Hall.
13th March, 1997. © Copyright.

Citizen Ship 2013. Nos 10. Aliens visit the Waterfront, Belfast.

The first time I visited the Waterfront hall in 1997, I met Paddy McGarvey, a retired newspaper reporter with years of experience behind him. He worked quite a bit in London but his early days were spent in Armagh.

Paddy still is a man with a great imagination. He had began an organization called “The Irish Parliament Trust” and his idea was to promote a shared north/south parliament at Trim. To that end he commissioned me to produce an illustrated map to get the idea across, in an entertaining way. He was then going to produce a magazine to be distributed, free, to students on either side of the border.

When I had finished the map, I arranged to meet him at Navan, the ancient capital of Ulster. This symbolism made sense to us both. The map now is on show on the top floor of the Linenhall Library, along with one of my other illustrated maps.

This poem, “The Waterfront”, grew out of this meeting.

The Waterfront.

As I walked towards the Waterfront,
Rising up before me,
Fresh, domed presence, at the end of Chichester Street,
It looked to me, and anybody
With any imagination or humour,
Like the art mothership of an alien race,
Foreign to the North of Ireland.
Sent from the planet
Culture.

The closer I got,
The more I filled with hope.
Even the woman with the walkie-talkie
Told me, smiling,
That it reminded her too,
Of that self same mother craft.
A bountiful U.F.O.
A nightly spectacle.
When the lights of Belfast
Pinpoint its radiance.
Ready for take off.
Sitting, re-fueling,
All a glow.

If such a sister craft arrived
In Belfast tomorrow,
What a nonsense, it would make of things,
Our current dilemma, still festering in us all.
Driving us to hide from ourselves,
Away from the blackness.
To focus our tired, battered minds
On the lights, upon a stage.

Upon different songs, different plots
And these refreshing colours,
Flagged up to distract our bullish
Attention.
Before stepping out into the night again,
Only to brood upon our differences.
To honker down, to squat upon
That stubborn, Easter egg,
Warmed by our feathered backsides.

Snug beneath our different wings.
Bums on seats,
That only a moment ago,
Were unaware or even cared,
Which cheek, their neighbour sat with,
As they watched the show,
Or should I say
The performance,
Darling.

So I look upon this rounded craft,
With some inspiration.
Pray, that it does bring visitors from far away places,
To make a nonsense of our wee war.
To help us look outward
And not inward.
To look at each other
And not at the enemy.

Just another bum on another seat.
The cheek of it . . .

Written by Randall Stephen Hall.
13th March, 1997. © Copyright.
Dedicated to Paddy McGarvey. Armagh.

Citizen Ship 2013. Nos 9. Wind Caught off Slemish.

In this wee series of articles, generated by the current “Flag Issue” in Belfast, I thought I would include some poems from 1998, roughly the same time period when I presented my flag idea, “The Talking Flag”, to the City fathers. These poems are as relevant today as the flag design. All things are possible. I was just on my way back from a Swedish Festival when I noticed something from the plane . . .

Windmills at Slemish.

In flying from Gothenburg,
And then from Amsterdam,
Holland,
Land of the windmill,
My plane flew over Slemish.
Solid bump in the land.
Still casting it’s deep shadow
Across history, towards
Ballymena,
Fortress of Unionism.

And as I watched the green
Counterpane, beneath me,
I was startled to see,
Like Patrick and his priests,
The white windmills, set out against
That beautiful green undulation,
Walking towards Slemish,
With arms raised up in praise
Of God.

Those windmills,
Their white blades, driven by
His breath.
Turning, changing a sometimes,
Violent wind.
Creating a new current.
A different energy.
Catching the wind,
Instead of just letting the opportunity pass.
Harnessing the rushing pull and push,
That drives the clouds, to plough for us.

And as I landed once again,
Home.
Travelling in Europe, after
Thirteen years of containment,
I thought upon this vision.
These symbols of hope.
The windmills that catch his breath
Off Slemish.

If they can catch the wind
And change it into something
More useful,
More positive,
Why can’t we ?

Written by
Randall Stephen Hall.
9th March, 1997. © Copyright.

Citizen Ship 2013. Nos 8. A New Civic Flag for Belfast.

“Dead Badger” was the first poem in a collection I called Dam Bursting from 1998 ©. My first trip to The Gothenburg Irish Festival, in 1997, resulted in a rush of poetry, shortly after returning home to Northern Ireland. These 14 poems written in a concentrated period of two weeks, enabled me to focus on written work with a strong Belfast theme.

They look at my identity, being Northern, from a Presbyterian background and, in many ways, just not fitting in. Feeling like an outsider. In 1998 I returned to Gothenburg and performed all these poems as part of the festival at Haga Forsamlingshem 28.2.98. It was a good thing to do.

The year before, at the last minute, I had substituted for another speaker at a Seamus Heaney poetry reading event at Silvi’s Palestinian Restaurant, Iron Square, Gothenburg. This was my first workshop and a very postive baptism of fire.

Dead Badger.

I lift its sorry head, up off the hard roadside.
No one told it, that it was unsafe to cross.
The mud and welt of the car tread,
Still fresh, upon its beautiful coat.
Its back pads face skyward.
Dark leathery pads, extended mini-gorilla feet.
Its head, tucked away, searching for sleep,
To ease the pain,
Buried beneath its rough grizzled shoulders.

Many years ago, on my last journey to watch The Twelfth
For the sake of my mother,
Hoping for a peaceful day,
We stood across the road from King William’s small plot
Of land, a park, a triangle of grass and trees.
Snoutlike, sniffing at Shaftesbury Square.
We waited for the bands to come.
And as they came, their sound swelled within my young heart and mind.

THUMP JAGA THUMP, JAGA THUMPA JAGA THUMP,
JAGA JAGA, JAGA JAGA, THUMPA JAGA THUMP !

All was well, for a while, until . . .
A father, with his young child,
Attempted to cross, in front of the oncoming Orange Lodge.
Seeing it now, I wonder . . .
Did the wee boy need to the toilet ?
Was he just hungry ?
Had the pair of them just seen
The boy’s mother in the crowd ?
I still see it now.

SALMON & SON, leaping the solid cascade of Orange-isms,
And almost reaching the sanctuary of the calm upper pool.

At the far side, he was pulled down.
With violence and disbelief, raging in their tiny eyes.
Cable snapped brutality,
Performed for our dull gaze.
Amazed at the old man,
Rushing up from the back of the phalanx,
To brandish all his old hurts,
Frothing like a mad dog, for the “Englishman”
To stab at the young father,
To prod with his honourable, Christian,
Beribboned axe.

The son, whimpering,
Washing his fresh hurts from the tarmac,
With his own tears,
Until this little family, honourably beaten, (Part of our rich heritage,)
Were allowed to scuttle and melt,
Like two half eaten, discarded ice creams,
( We call them “pokes” here, )
Back through the host of embarrassed minds,
That said nothing,
That did nothing.
Who watched the pageant unfold,
A blood orange.

I lift the dead Badger, now,
Up off the side of the road,
Wrapped, gently, in old newspapers,
And quietly say to it…..
“ You’ll be okay with me.”
And set it with respect,
Down into the dark safety of my car boot.

No one told it,
“ You can’t cross here. “

Another Badger,
Late for his tea,
Resting in an unexpected grave.

Written by
Randall Stephen Hall.
© Copyright, 10th March 1997.