first day of spring by pd lyons

First Day of Spring

my daughter asks me
why did people invent war?
don’t they know it’s the devil not god that likes war?
do children have to fight?
do they kill children too?
boys, and girls?
how old are the children?
why don’t the soldiers just quit?

and then the sound a jet passing
she thinks it wondrous dashes off to look

and for all those for whom that sound is terror?

because of them
we must love the world
all the more

on the train from cork to Dublin 28 Oct. The Enduring Myth of Heaven

yesterday on the train from Cork to Dublin I had a great conversation with two women who sat next to me. One of the things that came up in conversation was how religion seems geared for militancy. I mean I was raised catholic and I never hear once that we pray for reconciliation between God and the devil. And don’t so many religions have the component of we can be closer to god by persecuting the “other” who s not fortunate enough to be us. There are the chosen people, the infidel, the witches, the pagan, the heathen, crusades, the caste outs, LGBTQ+. Always seems that the chosen folk need a common enemy.

Those who kill for god get the best heaven the best seats in paradise etc No wonder the so called holy land is one of the bloodiest lands. But the sacrificial blood stains all lands. Ironic that the core tenants in each religion there can be found an antitheses to the justifiable homicide. And there are many folk who understand this. Unfortunately there are also many who can spin a web of political, corporate, power gain into human sacrifice.

and just to be clear we talked about the religion of corporation, capitalism, business. In the crusade of the corporate, all fundamentalist will be provided with weapons  – for a fee. The corporate religion follows the god of “if we can make money selling it then its a god thing”

So what can a person do? If every person does what they can that would be enough – that’s my belief. Don’t diminish you action as not being big enough. Don’t criticise you self for having fear and reluctance. These are dangerous times. But rather than waste energy on criticising yourself and others. Ask yourself what can I do. What more can I do with the resources at hand. If you have an emotional response of wanting to do more then ask yourself thinking questions to find out what more it is possible for you to do. Are there protests? Are there petitions? Can you vote? Can you write letters?

The corporation is the religion of the fundamentalists. Isis is a corporation. Boko Haram, any state or group who is in the business of whole sale murder is a corporation. It seeks to empower itself over others in any way. Every revolution is a corporate take over. Just the names of the exploiter and exploited are changed.

What can you do? Then what will you do?

The Enduring Myth of Heaven

the sacrament of murder

transcends all doctrine

the only universal link yo god –

justifiable homicide

Life In the Time of Enlightenment

my gods bigger than your god

my gods bigger than yours.

my gods better cause we kill more for him

my gods better than yours

 

My main point is that it is so easy to manipulate a religion into a militant tool no matter what the original tenant started off as. With in my opinion, the corporate world as being the most organised and ruthless religion of all. e.g. without the corporate religion how many school children’s lives would have been saved in America? ~

fortunate in being selected to be in The Storms 3

I was fortunate in being selected to be in The Storms III. One of the most beautiful journals I have ever seen! In the company of wonderful artists the zoom reading event was fantastic! Please do yourself a favour and seek them out in print on line and in pod cast. Thanks so much to the editors and designers and my fellow artists.   ~ https://eatthestorms.com/storm-team/

 

 

Damien B Donnelly

Podcast host & producer / The Storms Editor-in-chief

Damien B. Donnelly is the award-winning author of the poetry pamphlet Eat the Storms, a Stickleback micro-collection and the conversational pamphlet In the Jitterfritz of Neon, co-written by Eilín de Paor, all published by Hedgehog Poetry Press. He’s the host & producer of Eat the Storms, the poetry podcast and editor-in-chief of The Storms, a printed journal of poetry, prose and visual art. His work appears in various journals, online and in print. His first full collection Enough! was published by Hedgehog Press in August 2022 and his second collection, Back from Away, is coming in 2024.

 

Nithy Kasa

Sub-editor The Storms Issue 3

Nithy Kasa is a Congolese-Irish poet whose work is featured on the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation website, the University of Galway’s archive, the Special Collections of University College Dublin, Poetry Ireland Review and others. She is among the ten poets selected for Poetry as Commemoration for the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme by UCD supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. She’s the recipient of I bhFad i gCéin international residencies for Cave Canem by Poetry Ireland, The Arts Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs. She received the Poetry Ireland Commission 2020 and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award 2021. Her debut collection of poetry, Palm Wine Tapper and The Boy at Jericho, Doire Press 2022, was selected by the Art Council of Ireland for the ‘read mór’ for Culture Night Ireland 2022, was listed among the top poetry books of 2022 by the Irish Times, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2023. Nithy is also a facilitator registered with the Irish Writers Centre.

https://eatthestorms.com/storm-team/

The Palestine Of My Heart, by PD LYONS

The Palestine Of My Heart

stares like a stranger

sometimes from doorways almost in the rain

sometimes through haloed moonless streets

unable to make peace

unable to articulate

engaged none the less

the Palestine of my heart

flows like tears

through my each and every step

how can I meet this darkness all alone?

it is through weeping not muscle

such chains are broken

 

The Israel Of My Heart, by PD LYONS

The Israel Of My Heart

stares like a stranger

sometimes from doorways almost in the rain

sometimes through haloed moonless streets

unable to make peace

unable to articulate

engaged none the less

the Israel of my heart

flows like tears

through my each and every step

how can I meet this darkness all alone?

it is through weeping not muscle

such chains are broken

 

Nobody’s Child Should Be Killed… by pd lyons /read by the poet

No Body’s Child Should Be Killed

Great adventure
Fraught with spills of Disney danger
Ogre infested roller coasting
Wood slates buckle
In a pre-safety -harness dawn

There are no directions home
Resistance is fatal
No one can verify the conspiracy theory of your life
Contact with those you even think can
Is mercilessly forbidden
(Who are you?)
Why do you think they’re so far away?
No body can stay in one place any more
Besides who do you think they are?

Through cracked glass eye
Looking glass creatures
What will you find?
Where do you go?
Paris in springtime
Looking at you kid
Better hold onto your life
Draped in Shan gri la la la boom D A
Dancing merry as a moth in May

All your wonderful fears
All your fantastical inspirational fears
Settle into muddy sucking reasons,
Reasons to stay home go to work, get insured,
Go home, watch every possible moment of TV

Your mission, you’ve accepted, is non negotiable
The situation is non superficial
Critical mass is a constant
There’s not enough pretence to make a hill of beans
The whole world is looking for a blanket to hide under
If you don’t keep your back turned all the trees that have turned into gorilla monsters
Will get you and if they get you they’ll get me so do as you’re told

Pins and needles dinosaur chimes of freedom flashing brief
As if all the lifetimes of all the worlds were but a pan.
No matter how old you are
There’s always so much more time than that
You will not be
(Who are you?)
Where do you go?
The simple joy of youth –
The ability to say fuck you to the truth and mean it
But when do you become adult?
Where are those roads you promised to go down?
Rank and file
Basically a rotten plan for escaping.
No matter where you go there they are.
No matter where you go, there you are.

I am’s what I am and I can’t stands no more.

You get the life you deserve,
You get the leaders you deserve –
You know we don’t deserve anything as fucked up as we got.
A strung out petrol-chemical nightmare addiction full blown paranoiacs unexplainable any more by mere greed.

Its people. It’s made from people.

The small-scale suicide is terrifying.
You want something comforting like Hiroshima or Auschwitz.
There’s a degree of stupidity that transcends mercy.
(Who are you?)
Where do you go?
Dukes of hazard big brother X file factor mabaline extravaganza
How to be the perfect whatever it is they’re trying to sell this week

There goes your final wake up call
There’s no going back
No post-apocalyptic fiction
No post anything
It’s apocalyptic now
Right now there’s no fucking later.

Oh the wisdom of the west – base your entire way of life on a single
Rapidly diminishing non-renewable highly toxic substance found mainly in parts of the world where the indigenous peoples hate you for it.
There’s no fictional account of anything.
Every book a holy drivel worshiped by some idiot.
The majority of all life is lived in panic.
Which way do we go?
Which way do we go?

The Roman Empire built on concrete
Blood mixed in the mortar lasts a thousand years
You in the west
You in the west
Foundations set in human blood
Good reason why it rhymes with best.
The blood of all the children of this world
Nourishes your unequivocal pursuit of acquisition and
Only the insane would ever want to blow it up.
(Who are you?)
What does it take to fill you?
When will you ever have enough?
You who have everything can’t even recognise what enough looks like.
Insatiable pit, a black hole without even an ass to hold it
(Who are you?)
How do you travel?
To eternity, to the great beyond, to the wild blue yonder?
SUV Four wheel drive of course
Crush the world you see through TV windows
Climate controlled stereo CD DVD padded seats and harnesses
Oblivious to howls screams flood fire
No shake no rattle no roll
In complete safety and comfort – just like your own home.

Oh say can you see
How fuckin deaf can you be?
So much stupidity wields a star spangled nightmare
Of pure un awakening destruction.

If you want bananas
Will grow in blood
Pineapples in blood
Horror provides the blood with which you preserve your way of life
How do you not know?
How do you not see?

How long before the insane old men with their dried up old salt entrenched vengeful versions of arrogant entitlement shit die off?
Where do they keep coming from?
Is there never to be an end of ignorance in power?

There’s no place left to go.
Where do you think you’ll go when this world is dead?
Where do you think your child will be?
How can anyone not get it?
People die, human beings die mothers fathers children babies infants die so you can drive your car and wear your pretty little diamond rings
And before they die they live in misery
So you can make Justine Timberlake richer than god
People watch their babies’ burn – on fire so you can count the shopping days before Christmas,
Have more shit than you’ll ever know what to do with, poison everything on the planet to get it and still feel depressed because you don’t have e-fuckin-ough.
(Who the fuck are you?)
Where do you go?
Cinematic re writes history
With theme songs and celebrities –
There is no sound track to the horrors of your world,
Plenty of human voices afraid
Afraid of their own pain
Afraid for their children –
Drenched in ancient orange napalm bikini smart bomb festival of fleshtuals
Ritualised horror but not terror
Drowned out with TV and Mctimberlake, Magazines and talk show diets
Wal-Mart shopper specials, medicines and miller time.
Why would you want to hear anything else?
When do those old mother fuckers who kill our children die off?
When do those killers die off?
The only question worth asking.
The only one worth answering.
The only one worth hearing
Why don’t they take their own stupid asses to that heavenly paradise?
Leave the rest of us alone.
No body’s child should be killed for any asshole person, place or thing
Even if it is your god.

I Would Abandon All Other Cities For This by PD Lyons as read by the poet

I Would Abandon All Other Cities For This

To wake from sleep with little angels
Cross weeping waters ,Opiate lilies, Rolled tobacco porcelain skin
We could talk
I would give out money, paper money for free
Answer, because you are sitting on the streets I was born into this world on.

I would pass from them like loose wrappers
cobbled stone behind lost mythologies, strangers foreign even to my self
But could if I want sift sea salt stolen dreams, camera fantastic songs,
long meandering trails to and from the stars siren spiralling
a better life only in theory because I would give up all other cities for this ~

To wake from sleep with nameless angels
Cross weeping water smugglers
Beggar a hazy sun dry enough for a nod nod noddy nod.
Soft we could talk knowing no remedy for tomorrow only respite from the past,
rest your head on my shoulder, safe from all clatter drift, from the hard shelters, the rough searchers, the mingling watery blood sucked ones.

I’d tell you stories of cities abandoned long ago, Where warmth was free
angels had names; heroes would rescue even you.
I would sleep without being asleep, your head on my shoulder
I would not move when disentangled from my arms
You’ll pooch my pockets for something worth taking, cash.
Let you have it going,
never to call you anything but by your long-ago name
the one your mother whispered once all sea spray
hidden away from anyone else but me.

sometimes I will find quiet even in the day light
sometimes I will find a way warm into the night
by myself again there in only gentle ghosts I blend
my new skin, my confident sway
a sweetness beyond graves
among stars.

WANTING TO BE IN THE OLD TONGUE as read by the poet

WANTING TO BE IN THE OLD TONGUE

Words
Someday
Someone
Might say to you.
Unimportant memories
Aroused to beauty non-the-less
Like cobwebs beaded up with dew,
Brass fittings on a cedar door,
Day’s debris randomly swept into a banked up fire
Before to your own black iron bed you’d slowly go.

W/all our coming and our going
Will we ever meet again?
Fragile as the moth is the flame
One slight breath
And darkness has us all.
W/that in mind, I mind no dancer
Let us join whatever way we can
Before the waiting darkness
Makes us all fall down.

Clumsy fingers
Holds her own heavy breast skyward
As if the moon, areole hungry
Wouldn’t have found communion
Without guidance.

Gentle at the end of the world
Even rocks all soft
And buds of lilac silver slanting sun.
And when gems of green roll down
Meet the slate blue sea
Gently rippled by disappearing pearls?

Somewhere we still know women who paint the things we see in dreams

Wanting to be in the old tongue
January crows gather.
From the eviction house
Another row of slate slips.
Sun orange fingers
Poke dark shy pillows,
Disturbing bread crumb dreams,
Little red breast birds.

Shouldn’t you be left alone?
Cradled in the earth for another thousand years or so?
Discovered as some tantalising source
Of artefactual speculation:
Those marks –
True cause of death,
Or left by some post mortem carnivore?
Perhaps sacrificial ritual,
Signs still legible,
Though fading as if
Some watercolour in reverse
Until only bare bleached paper
Slightly stained.

Ghost steps.
My warm eastern mouth nourishes,
My amniotic fingers curl,
Personal history noted,
As if by some distant observer
Swirled into tight sips
Almost impossible to savour.

Between the posts at midnight
A long wire of electricity
Calls little bits of rusting iron
To lantern the siesta heart away.

When You Worship Swans no Longer by PD Lyons.
Poetry inspired by the village of Fore County Westmeath and surrounding areas of Ireland, by an Irish American poet.

“PD Lyons work stands at the threshold so loved in Ireland. That almost magical, almost mythical, almost otherworldly parallel that the Irish dip in and out of. Where we chose to believe in luck and superstition and destiny and embrace these as tangible factors in our daily lives. – from the forward by Una O’Neill D’Arcy, Journalist/Freelance Writer

Thank you in advance for supporting this project!

Special First Edition Limited to 150: each numbered and signed by the poet.

Price includes worldwide shipping by regular post in padded envelope.

20.00 dollars US/15 euros Ireland/20 euros rest of Europe/15. sterling

Items shipped upon receipt of order (purchase through Paypal)

Contact: pdlyonspoet@yahoo.co.uk

With your shipping information and any queries.

Additional inscription on request.

(Numbered books selected randomly)

,

Halloween, For all who’ve gone before we celebrate your passing and our own waiting.

dark moon, once upon a time when we were young…..

Dark Moon May 19, 2004. Cape Breton. In Gemini

crone, the woman past menopause, old age, deep secrets, wisdom, divination, prophecy,

death and resurrection, endings (therefore new beginnings*)

Element: water

Colour: black

Goddesses: Hecate, Anna. 1

Moon in Gemini – I adapt – mutable air sign. 2

Colour: orange

spells. To finish the old and move on to the new, to juggles the many projects (multi task*),

finding new car or job, mental arts including meditation, divination etc. Magick for learning to

understand and deal with siblings. 3

crystal or scrying bowl placed in the centre of the circle – “This is the ending before the

beginning, the death before new life. Now on the ebb tide the secrets of the shore line are

uncovered by the retreating waves. The moon is hidden, but the faintest of stars are revealed

and those who have eyes to see may read the fates and know the mysteries. The Goddess,

whose name cannot be spoken, naked enters the Kingdom of Death. In the most vast silence

and stillness, all is possible. We meet in the time of the Crone, to touch the deep power of the

dark.”  1

This phase of the Moon Mother’s face means totally having the potential to be whole, to voyage

forth in the dark void with your light-body. You spare yourself nothing, for all sacrifices are

realized to be ‘making sacred’… During the Dark Moon you can see into the future and

actualize it through the harmonic vibrations of your cells. This takes deep trust and also getting

in touch with your larger purpose from before you were born – why you incarnated?

We are crossing the sea of the dark night

in the boats of our bodies, these vehicles of light.

Help me to release all that is not love                                      ( Banishing Pentacle @ each 

Help me to release all that is not light                                         ‘Help- Me’ line)*

Help me to release all that is not truth

Help me to release all that is not prosperity

Help me to release all that is not compassion

Help me to release all that is not proper action

Help me to release all that is not courage

Help me to release all that is not…(improvise)

I am happy even in a black hole for I am a light unto myself. 4  

††††††††

送眀

††††††††ഀƐwഏ

Cast circle outside do Shelly’s elven spell outside..( use above re scrying/meditation inside.)

Inside Altar: Chessboard, midnight blue cloth, black obsidian egg south, hematite egg east,

pyrite egg west, scallop shell with Irish Cavan soil in it – north. Gargoyle stone candle holder,

green candle, centre bowl of salt water for scrying, quartz crystals and eggs around it, goddess figure ( Willendorf figure terracotta) crone, and sword lies between scallop shell & crystal eggs.

Do Shelly’s fairy prosperity charm inside. meditate. speak out loud Starhawk quote and This

Mother’s face. Speak Help me lines, as above plus improvising. Shelly casting banishing

pentacle with her dagger at the end of each line.

Open circle outside. Prior to opening invoke protection (psychic & physical – shooting star in

the south as if in answer) Crisp cold clear night.

“When everything else is gone, true happiness remains.” PDL

Sources

* improvised/ stuff of our own

1. Spiral Dance. Starhawk. 1979 edition. Harper Row. SF
2. Goddess Spirituality. Ffiona Morgan. 1991ed. Daughters Of The Moon Publishing. CA.
3. Solitary Witch. Silver Raven Wolf. 2003. Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul
4. Faces Of The Moon Mother. Rowena Pattee Kryder. 1991. Golden Point Productions. Mount

Shasta, CA.

:5. Witches’ Date Book. 2004. Llewellyn Worlwide. St.Paul.

6.The Old Farmer’s Almanac, Canadian Edition. Robert B. Thomas. 2004. Yankee Publishing

Inc. Dublin, NH.

7 Wicca Craft, Gerina Dunwich. 1991. Citadel Pres. NY

8 Wicca. Viviane Crowley. 1989. Aquarian Press/Harper-Collins. London.

9. Masks Of Misrule. Nigel Jackson. 1996. Capall Bann Publishing. Berks UK.

All is sacred.

The goddess is always present

scorpion night 1