Down, down goes the ledge.
Close again.
Where is the hand to help me up?
Blind, blind, blind you all are.
No one can see my pain and fear.
Oh, if only life was better at throwing the dice of luck,
I'd be elsewhere.
But it is what it is.
Give me a rope for ****'s sake!

When great aunt Maggie passed away years ago, the one thing I really missed was her angelic voice.
The swaggering, sing-song lilt of the mid-Derry accent was as sweet as the confections she used to pass out to us as kids:
The inflection, the intonation, and the slight lisp she brought to it was so gloriously unique but was never heard again.
I often wish I could go back with a tape recorder to capture it in all its glory and relive how wonderful she was.
Now all I have is a untranslatable memory that can't be brought back to even vaguely approximate what it meant to me.

And now here I am again with the same obstacle.
The same tones, the same inflections albeit through a different light have just been extinguished before me.
This time there was no digital device rushing in to capture our time before it ran out.
No instinct for preservation was forthcoming - we were too busy having fun & 'being here now'.
No, once again I am bereft:
All I I have is here (in my heart) and and here (in my head)
The loved sounds I miss will always resound there albeit without backup
Voices lost but not forgotten.

It's a phrase I often playfully use to describe my queer self.
("Were you ever?"my beloved Alison uniformly says in jest).
But now it seems unusually apt in another way:
As I swann around this empty house, the decor, the photos, the ornaments and old perfume bottles overwhelm me.
My head is brimming with memories as I glance past these fragments of our shared lives.
My loss is palpable and yet inescapable under this roof.
She surrounds us on the walls, hanging over us with her beaming smile amidst the family photos.
I want to escape but I can't:
In a mad way I want to believe that something of these relics around us can bring her back somehow.
She did after all carry something of the old Irish paganism with her.
But, no, this ancient shamanism is sadly absent in a room drowned out by every token of Catholicism you can think of.
It's all too much for this first born to take and yet she is still here in the tiny gaps of these precious artefacts.  
Hidden away where you can't see her.
So, no, being honest right now - I'm not quite straight yet.
The head and heart will realign soon but not with this gnawingly painful grief.
Pray for me.

Breathe In, Breathe Out
Breathe In, Breathe Out

The background silence is deafening against the sound of your own awful struggle.
The inevitable is patiently waiting in a darkened corner of the room as we sit around your bed in reluctant readiness.
A noble hardy vigil but one that, unlike the others, I must confess is new to me.
I had consciously avoided receiving death all my adult life and now here, my greatest champion and comfort was being dragged into the snare.
The last hours were truly stifling - I wanted to scream my lungs out and tear down the walls.
How could it have come to this ******* pitiful ending?
But no,
knowing your calm patient Christian ways the only righteous path for you my sweet, was to take your hand and whisper our last words of love to you.
It was the only way for you, mother.
Death is not the stuff of over-dramatised fiction, it's the quietest test we face for those we love.

How often do you hear the expression "there's never enough time"?
Too much to fully comprehend its full ramifications:
The lost moments,
the endless "what if?" of unrealised human experience that simply vanishes in the ether,
the cold antiseptic realisation of death and one's grief for the time not spent with loved ones.
The misery of losing out to it all.

I say stop.

Embrace your family & friends while they are still sharing the same breath as you.
Forgive them for whatever trespasses they have & find a new commonality in love.
Tell them of their unmeasurable worth to you and all the others in their demi-monde.
Endlessly compliment them on their radiance and sheer uniqueness in the face of adversity.  

But don't forget to relish the gloriously diverse life all around you.
Or seek out the beauty of humanity's immense creativity and start to participate.
Sample how life can be truly transcendent if you just pay attention.
There is more to us all that waiting on the "right", convenient moment to connect.
Because, my friend, there is enough time for us all:
you just need to change the direction as time is no friend to our fragility.

November 7th 2018

The plane that brought me here has long gone.
The fear of being isolated & rootless here, disseminated over time.
The strength of positive thinking flowered in the whenua.
The power of finally being one’s own self blossomed like sweet red pohutakawa
This is what I gained in 10.

The love of the land and its tangata whenua, swooned me over
The beauteous feeling of living simply soothed my ageing soul
The ease of making friends (a skill I had given up on) was really as ‘easy as’.
Life is there to be taken, not endured.
This is what I learned in 10

September 19th 2018

Auntie Em is calling….

I was just getting to love my Emerald City
The shiny feel of it, its sweetly diverse demi-monde.
Its shimmering green beauty and tranquil sense of safety.
The heels of my ruby red slippers were well & truly dug in.
But no, the state fair balloon stands before me ******* & ready to go.
A grand exclamation mark in my way if ever there was one.
And Toto for once has gone mute, no chance of a last minute hold up.

"Dorothy, Dorothy, where are you?"

I guess it must have been too fantastical a dream to be true.
A time for goodbyes.
I’m embracing the Lion telling him to always be proud of himself & not to walk unafraid.
The Tin Man’s gentle open heartedness I compliment him on as we both shed tears.
The Scarecrow I kiss and thank for his loyalty & grace under fiery pressure.
With a heavy heart, I climb that first tentative step on the block.  

"We’re sick with worry over you"

I could be angry but the wise words of the mystic ring loudly in my year.
I do need to go back – My Auntie Em is really calling me.
Calling me back to the grey flatlands of home.
Back to the numbness of small town heteronormativity.
Where Twisters rarely every came by to sweep you away and save you.
I could only keep singing ‘Over The Rainbow’ in vain hope.

"Find yourself a place where you won't get into any trouble!

Unlike Dorothy Gale, this Dorothy left Kansas voluntarily
The long yellow brick road finally took me under the rainbow and on to my Emerald City
I no longer pined for home but knew all along that it would call me back one day.
And so here I am, drifting higher & higher away from my adopted home.
Perhaps I need to build a revolving door when I get there to pass through both worlds easily
Or perhaps bring something of the rainbow back to illuminate the grey-lands.
Or perhaps – in reality -  some reconciliation between these worlds is in order.
Perhaps.
It’s time to slip on the ruby red slippers and prepare the way for Kansas.
Yes, this Dorothy has surrendered but
I always had the power to be me, my dear.
I just had to learn it for myself.

August –September 2018

We are the kids – beautiful blank canvasses ready to receive the joy of life.
We are the kids – hope & love consuming our souls, grasping at the shiny & new.
We are the kids who played in the fields and danced in the sun.
We are the kids with innocence in our hearts and a cheekiness in our soul.
We are the kids who believed in a benevolent God and the generous teachings of Jesus.
We are the kids whose imagination was an infinite resource - bounteous, diverse and effervescent.
We are the kids who reveled in the fancy, the nonsensical, the romantic and the wild.
We are the kids that couldn’t wait to grow up,
We are the kids who believed in our future.
We are the kids who never saw it coming.

We are the kids who lost our innocence as soon we walked through the big school gates for the 1st time.
We are the kids who were told to “think of your future” and to suppress creativity.
We are the kids who were forced to grow up very quickly.
We are the kids who didn’t know we were “different” but there were plenty out there who did.
We are the kids who had to pretend to be what “they” wanted us to be just to survive.
We are the kids who came home with scars every day – both physical and emotional
We are the kids who endured the obscene words of Neanderthal hate every single day.
We are the kids who were screamed at by our parents to fight back even when we really didn’t have the capability to do so.
We are the kids who were told crying was a sign of weakness.
We are the kids whose so-called classmates stayed silent when they did their worst.
We are the kids where the school gates were no barrier to their lynching.
We are the kids who turned quickly from being wide-eyed & hopeful to being terrified & desolate.
We are the kids who dreaded every single weekday from first term to last.  
We are the kids who fruitlessly prayed to a God who had deserted them.
We are the kids taught by teachers who were found wanting.
We are the kids who suffocated in sheer hate.
We are the kids who took our own lives or at least tried to.
We are the kids who self-harmed.
We are the kids who sometimes never came home.
We are the kids who survived but never really left the school yard behind
We are the kids.
Your kids.

June 11, 2018.

“Oh you’re Irish?” he said.
“Did you learn the language much?” he said.
Honestly, what can I tell him? I was raised in the North - a ****** wasteland for such a naïve question.
Vague memories of fumbled classes where our secret history was ditched just to get straight into the basics (Cad é mar atá tú?)
No – seriously - I was not tied to it – it was anonymous to me at that age.
Forgotten like some distant echo of once visiting Coole House as a child.
Sure, we knew it was “important”, “our national language”, “heritage” etc. and we were warned it was quickly slipping into the drain of Western hegemony.
But it was baffling, unsexy and only the blunt-faced humorless IRA thugs amongst us were in any way keen.
Then it was gone, just like the faded memories of “The Children of Lir” from my primary school.

Looking back I wonder, what was the point?
A half-full measure paying lip service to our identity.
Teachers and headmasters terrified of the grand colonial reveal that the lessons might have hinted at (were they trying to stop us being Provos-in-waiting?).
And all of this against the awful shame of a common tongue that had no foe yet was slowly vanquishing from our shores.
It could have all been so different.
Rather than rushing to get something in our empty skulls, they could have given us a sense of joy, pride & belief in our own culture.
Calling on Yeats, Behan, Heaney and others to drown us in the language of our ancestors.
Telling the stories of old that only the academics & hippies were keeping from us then.
You know, it might kept us all on the same beautifully illuminated page.
We might have been comfortable in our skins and open to others,
not looking deep into our worthlessness and lashing out at them.
Language is being and language is connecting, I’ve learnt.
But that’s not something I got from my secondary school.

June-July 2018

Glenshane Pass separated you both.
23 miles away in the same time, same place as my father’s childhood.
So when you talked of your da digging Toner’s bog and waxed lyrical about sheughs, I knew in our English class what exactly you were saying (when others didn’t).
Your words float over time & space to me now.
A celebration of the intimacy of our homelands.
A holy adoration of long gone voices that still resonate.

You never strayed, never.
It was always in your heart, always:
the land, the forgotten lanes, the broad fields, the lost language of it all.
I keep a certain comfort now with your lines as I Iay in my southerly home,
knowing that I am forever tithed to the townlands of our shared ancestry.
I thank you.
May your words stay alive as song as Ireland still has its beauty
and may their illumination still shine on us all.

Robert Frost once talked of taking the ‘road less travelled’.
Well, I didn’t.
When the time came, I blindly went and took the safest road.
A very long path where the pitfalls were plenty.
I stumbled in the bracken. Stymied by the darkness that fell quickly as I ambled along.
The soul bruised, battered and exhausted at every infrequent stop.
It was not apparent then that in this venture there was a bleak dead end ahead.
I plowed on even though something inside was telling me again and again to turn back.
But, slowly, a gleaming light of hope crossed my vista beckoning me home.
I crawled. My strength regained as the light intensified.
Then the end was in sight - the portal was within grasp.
And so, yes, I now take that road less travelled.
Standing tall and proud as I gleefully stride down its glowing thoroughfare.  
Smiling at the diverse and playful changes that cross my pathway.
All told, it’s never too late to trust your instincts and make a difference.
Just ask me.
And Robert Frost.

Crumbling Victorian concrete falls to the ground.
The crunch of rubble, levelling histories to dust.
All this is “progress”, “a bright opportunity” and “good for the economy”.
Yeah, but for who?
Those who live there? The communities forged from years of migration?
Those who take pride in the shape and feel of their own unique milieu?
It seems, no.

Look closer and you’ll find a hidden clue - the quietly mouthed magic word: “apartments”.
It won’t be long before a weekly shop will need a pay-day loan.
Or the late night fish supply shop turns into a swishy niche café.
WINZ offices relocating to where its denizens have been priced off to.
Meanwhile the newly whiter-than-whitewash feel of our once beloved suburbs,
present themselves as bastions of modernity and “progress”.
What lies in the rubble is not just dust, it’s the debris of pākehā civility.

"You had to be there, I guess".
What will they think of us in a century’s time?
The sheer knuckle-draggedness of it all
Neo-fascism as neo-fashion.
Guns, guns, guns.
The celebration of vacuousness as virtue.
It’s hard not to think of us all staring into the void right now.
But if we stay silent, we die.
Fight hate with hope.
Celebrate diversity with inclusivity.
Otherwise history will judge us, harshly.
It’s not that difficult, people.

There you were:
Second to last track
Side 1, “Atlantic Soul Classics”.1987
R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (Take out the TCP)
The power, the control, the energy,
Never heard a **** thing like it.
Then that Cliff Richard Show footage I saw on some old BBC clip show (yeah, I know…Cliff, eh?)
“Don’t Play That Song” in crackly black & white
Sorry for the language, Sister.. but ****, the power of your piano playing in that moment made me realise that you were not “just a singer” but a full-on force to be reckoned with.
Like Sinatra you studied lyrics like a monk deep in illumination and then blew the song away with your received otherworldly knowledge:

Eleanor Rigby
The Weight
The Dark End of The Street
Border Song
Bridge Over Troubled Water
I Say A Little Prayer

Oh, these were your songs, now. Don’t let anyone forget it.

But there was something more to you than all of this.
The way MLK kissed you with beaming pride at some long, forgotten award ceremony.
The way you sashayed African culture when you stepped out in public.
The way you ripped up your own records when you tread the boards & faced your humbled audience.
The way you stood by Angela Davis when she was hooked up on some stupid jackshit Hoover charge.
The way you verbalized the black American experience not just through countless moments of  sheer liberation but in the solemn way you stepped up to the piano on Amazing Grace
You comforted this whiter-than-white Paddy on more than one occasion and forged a path of hope in many of his troubled waters.

Oh, God we will miss you & your power – all of it.
That once in a millennia voice whose measured restraint & joyful release touched millions.
You will never walk alone.

Farewell Queen.
You are finally at peace.
Thank you, thank you Ms. Franklin

Sean M. O’Kane
16/8/18