Abridged 0-29 Primal

Abridged 0 – 29: Primal: Edgar Martins, Lynda Tavakoli, Lynn Rothwell, Mark Goodwin, Sarah Usher, Stephen Murray, Cecilia Danell, Vivian Jones, Beth MacFarlane, Jan Harris, Stephanie Conn, Rebecca McGetrick, Dominic Connell, Kevin Graham, Aoife Mannix, Orla Fay, Mhairi Sutherland, Emma Must, Ruth Stacey, Eleanor Rees, Gail Mahon, Róisín Tierney, Martin Boyle, Ann Egan, Ian Clarke, David Andrew, Luke Prater, Belinda Loftus, Enda Coyle-Greene, Peter O’ Neill, Moyra Donaldson. Launch at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Thurs 04th April.

I was of course delighted to get an email from Gregory McCartney of Abridged saying that they would like to take my poem Of the Crow for this issue.  I always admire their submission calls.  Primal's was:

PRIMAL

The bodies of the naked on the low damp ground…In the violet hour to the violent sound

What first was humanity, in its primal condition, still smouldering with instinct and fear? We shift about in mind-forged manacles, the cold and viscous layer of the urban which closes us in with crusting edges. We are numbed and enveloped in the thick residue of industry and development. Lines of buildings, artificial languages and artificial lives, leave us unfeeling in unchallenged survival and a lost human heritage.

 

And we, low to the ground and overwhelmed in the sensurround, were marked with earth and the stench of other bodies. We were flooding inside, unlived and burning. All of our skin, naked to the air and to the movements of gravel under our pulsing palms and the balls of our feet; a charged weather encloses bare flesh, flailing bodies lit by a deep sun. We are locked and tangled in cyclical smoke movements around the flames and we are howling.

 

 

I've just submitted my latest two assignments through moodle.  They were 2000 words each on social and emotional well-being and gender in play.  Happy Easter!