GloPoWriMo 2018 - day twenty-four

Today the prompt is to write an elegy that also contains and element of hope.


Jimmy Saville

For many years the media lauded your fundraising efforts,
And the public saw a genial and rather odd man,
Loveable perhaps, laughable for sure, but always
Positive and ready to help.
Friend of the sick and halt, helper of the lame,
And lover of little children.
When you died, the world wept, or some of it did,
Other parts did not weep, and felt relief,
Gladness, that loosening feeling at the end of the ordeal.
It seems strange to offer your death as a moment of hope,
But it is, it was, and it remains so, as it was
The catalyst that allowed the revelation of an age
Of abuse, it allowed the silent ones a voice that
For the first time was being listened to.
From your life, which amidst the evil and corruption
Also offered good, a bizarre silver lining of money
To expiate incompletely the sins of the donor,
From your life has grown a generation of people who
Are less afraid to shout out "Me Too", and a newly
Empowered voice granted to women who for too long
Have been told to be quiet and smile.

GloPoWriMo 2018 - day five.

Today the prompt is take a poem not in English and imagine the translation describes a photograph.

"Calbharaigh

Chan eil mo shùil air Calbharaigh
no air Betlehem an àigh
ach air cùil ghrod an Glaschu
far bheil an lobhadh fàis,
agus air seòmar an Dùn Èideann,
seòmar bochdainn 's cràidh,
far a bheil an naoidhean creuchdach
ri aonagraich gu bhàs."

(Somhairle MacGill-Eain)

The photo is of the cairn at Hallaig in Raasey.

(I know a little of Gaelic, mostly from studying the poetry of Sorley MacLean, but only a very little.)

Calvary.

There is a modern Calvary, where man
Is sacrificed, not just from Bethlehem, but all
Men are depleted.
They move from their native earth, from the
Isles and the shoreline, from the trees
And the heather and the warmth
Of evening fire, to the rain-washed
Bare and naked streets of the big city,
To Glasgow and beyond, to serve not the
Goddess of the land, but the needs of
Money and capitalism.
This, then, is a modern Calvary.