Ciaro Hyland

Save our Trees!

Wrap them up in silk orange ribbon,

Give each one a sign of their own,

Show the world how much they really mean to our Town.

Save our Unfortunate!

Wrap them up in sleeping bags,

Give each one warm tea, sandwiches and a token political declaration,

Show the world how much they really mean to our Town.

Oh but forget sacrificial bus lanes that tear down precious oak.

Rather, let’s invest billions in a Metro,

And go to work each morning,

Beneath protected trees and rough sleeper’s dreams.

Oblivious to a reality which will always lie beyond leafy suburbs,

and above metal escalators and expensive bored tunnels;

The City’s doorways are momentary bedrooms,

And it’s corridors and laneways through which we move without much heed,

ii.

My sort of chic concrete Triste Tropique,

Where there’s a newness to every stale thing and life pours ordinary plenty over the bleak.

And shifty traffic-cone watchmen shout howya, story, the craic!

Fresh strawberries! Cigarettes, tobacco! Don’t be stressin’ bud, ‘tis only a quarter, I got your bleedin’ back!

Where sullen streets are roamed by sulphite-frees,

Cold-drip guzzlers, munchers of fine cheese;

And the rooftops are shouting save the fuckin’ bees!

Dublin; a cultured cosmopolitan throne to Ireland’s East,

With bread bakers, laugh fakers, risk takers and faceless artistes.

A hopelessly romantic ‘oul place that treasures its chimney stacks and whispers sweet nothings at dawn,

Then sings, shouts and raves through night until morn.

With Bunsen, Tinder, Ha’penny Selfies and the VCC,

Igniting a generation’s love poetry.

Raging, wild, untamable, violent, thrashing, slapping and thumping Corrib.

Cutting through like a Razor Love,

Dissecting recklessly, the beautiful beating heart of this wet-town

I make no effort to embellish such a reality with flowery poetic lingo,

Dublin was a very different place 50 years ago.

At the time, my grandad was a Corpo man,

And he’d oft tell me tales over tea, ‘Tommy Clemens’ and ham;

Of bin-backed Corpo workhorses, scaling town-house stairs,

Past ill reputes, picking up piles of ponging refuse and bin-bagged nightmares.

Dirty old town, town of the hurdled ford, a far from Fair City,

These grand houses for aristocratic few, now plagued by an impoverished majority.

Eight to a room and six kids warming the floor,

With one gaunt haunted man guarding the door.

If only today’s manicured, ‘cos your worth it, plucked and bio-oiled,

Could see the tired faces of fifty years ago, embroiled,

In hiding through jest the only chink to their hardened armour, their gaze.

A gateway into an abyss of unrelenting impoverished malaise.

For there’s angst and hardship furrowed into our forefather’s forehead wrinkles,

Their fading faith kept sellotaped together by priest provided inkles.

Keep on chewing past the pain preached the pulpit warriors,

“You have served your penance now, just wait for your redemptive couriers”.

But just because we reflect in black and white does not mean their eyes were cast on colourless streets.

Dublin had wit, personality, culture and its resilient feats.

But you see, our city’s past is one gripped by the delusional,

By the political, by the religious, by the institutional.

Preaching pious electrification,

Of an oil-burning archaic nation.

Then, stacking their oppressive legacy on dusty shelves,

They gifted generations with an almighty conundrum;

What memories shall we choose to remember?

What questions shall we ask of ourselves?