Lament; or, Trump’s hotel in Doonbeg
The golf course running along the sea front stretches north from a cluster of buildings styled as mock Victorian village square built in shelter of the dunes of Doonbeg, in county Clare, where colours are soft, where marram grass bends to the eye running across from real village over bog-burren to meet sea-sky scape, reminding us of a Paul Henry painting; and of Riders to the Sea, Singe’s play after a story he’d heard on Inishmaan, about a man whose body was washed up on the shore; of the scene when a ghost is seen riding on a horse; the lament of a grief-stricken widow, her sons all dead in the dreaming of the play. Down for a wedding, wearrive at the back entrance (villagers advised the shortcut) beside public access to the beach, a beach the owner didn’t own. Village burghers had had their hands shaken by politicians, the hotel was good, a triumph, they said, jobs for the locals, but the locals were not very vocal, a shyness in their serving, near winking apologies for having taken the jobs, for taking the soup. On the beach the next morning, a pastiche of dark modern gothic silhouetted on the sky behind me, a man standing in shallows holding a rope attached to a horse circling round him, hooves plashing the waves breaking into land where the Atlantic crashes into Ireland; alone, man, horse, to the west, America, North America. Copyright © ALISON HACKETT, 2020 Reading (from 36mins) on Rattle's 'Poets Respond' live stream on 8 November 2020 Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together I've got some real estate here in my bag So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies And we walked off to look for America Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh Michigan seems like a dream to me now It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I've gone to look for America — Paul Simon There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America. — Barack Obama Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. — Martin Luther King, jr We are not makers of history. We are made by history. — Martin Luther King, jr We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. — Martin Luther King, jr A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus. — Martin Luther King, jr illustration by Alison Hackett, 2 Nov 2020 |
AuthorAlison Hackett — Director and founder of 21st Century Renaissance; author of The Visual Time Traveller 500 Years of History, Art and Science in 100 Unique Designs Archives
February 2023
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