OUR LADY OF BASEL
You sit serene in your ‘stately pleasure dome’ surrounded by sleeping men and
transitory love birds – possessions in a worn carrier bag, bedding neatly
folded beneath your trolley. The crown of flowers in your nest of hair speaks of
South Sea islands. The trinkets on your avian hands and wrists reveal a
magpie’s treasure hoard. Your clothes proclaim every pattern and
colour, as loud and bold as you are silent and gentle. Queen of your heaven at
three a.m., you settle in a dingy corner of Basel International railway station –
an unlikely grotto. But you are a graceful nightly apparition, a pleasant enigma for
the weary traveller. Your trolley-top tray is immaculately set for dinner. You peck at
it like a shy debutante, dab your beak delicately.
Our Lady of Basel you dazzle me with your beautiful serenity, shining as
your travelling companions fade. You fill the pre-dawn hours with showers of
colour and light. Our eyes never meet and yet I see you for ever and ever
Amen.
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
The Kapellmeister sits atop the world, atop his head a stovetop hat. A
fatly leery look bedecks his jowly face festooned with ticker tape mustachio. Psychedelic
eyes and lips – too fulsome florid – add terror to his snake-oil self. He’ll swallow us
entirely or take us bit by bit. “Ahem, ahem, ladies and gentlemen. Lend me your ears, your
eyes, your wakeful hours, your sleepful hours, your dreamful hours.” We
are transfixed by the menagerie of medleys bestowed upon us – the mediocre blend of
B list stars in jungles – whining, crying, dying. We are mock-horrified by misfits coaxed into
‘show and tell’ fight or flight for our schadenfreude delight. Fly on the wall swats reality into
orbit. The modern mountebank to a monumental waste of time sullies real-time
sleep with real-time likes and dislikes, posts and ripostes. Enslaved to
super foods and super fools, exposés and cliff-hangers, conspiracies and confessions – we
pay for the privilege. The privilege of seeing house, garden, face and body restored;
makeovers will make us great again. Our
boundless generosity gives impulsive standing ovations to crocodile tears, spontaneous
rounds of applause to braggadocio. We are appeased; distracted from the persecuted, the
disenfranchised and the war-weary; tickled pink by the peccadilloes of celebrities; too
busy to vote – too stupid to notice the Kapellmeister directing our lives, changing our
very world before our very blinkered eyes.
BABEL BUS
(or Dublin Bus before the pandemic)
My desire to speak in the tongues of the
ones on the bus is insatiable. I drown in the ‘riverun’ of
exotic words rolling over me. Waves of foreign youth flood the
top deck with
mellifluous Romance, Goth-like Germanic, Steppe-strong Slavic. They
enunciate Middle Eastern dialects like beautiful laughing prayers, sing
Asian vernaculars like ancient stringed instruments. Indian
sub-continental words dance and whirl, African languages
deliver the cast-iron certainty of rock-solid stories down the ages. The
Dublin bus sails into town; my skipper – a solemn Pole. I name this ship
Finnegans Wake; mine Anna Livia Plurabelle will learn some novel lingo. I
am a fool for Farsi, a sop for Swahili. And the wheels go round to the sound
of the babble of the new new new cosmopolitan rabble who dabble and
gabble in each other’s tongues, who patter in a smattering of lingua franca to
understand each other. I
am jammin’ to the intercontinental lexiconic mash-up on the Babel bus.
