A Postcard

My first workshop in beginner poetry went well. I kicked it off, as usual, by reading Szymborska's wonderful The Joy Of Writing.

After I came back to the Listowel Arms Hotel for lunch, I saw this great muddy cloud roofing the racecourse across the river, filtering the strong light so that the scene had something of a sepia postcard.

Later I was guest speaker for a poet friend, Joan McBreen's reading with the RTE Contempo Quartet, with whom she released an album of her poems with complementing Irish airs, alongside new work arranged and composed by the young Glen Austin. The album is titled The Mountain Ash In Connemara.. I wasn't at all sure how to go about such a thing (I've never been guest speaker before) but I think it went well. That same strong sunlight flooded the big windows opposite the row of seats where we sat, and I watched the net curtains lifting and stirring, as if the the (mostly) elegiac music.