time slips through my bones like a river of eels taking bits of me scavenging scraps of abandoned identity churned with a mass of electrified flesh rushing madly in need of the sea the cold comfort…
Source: River of Eels
Victor Jarra lest we forget
28 September 1932 – 15 September 1973
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, its indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
Elie Wiesel
THE GUNDESTRUP GHOSTS – Hidden Images in the Gundestrup Cauldron
Then there are ghosts and ghosts!
Discovered in a peat bog near the village of Gundestrup in Denmark in 1891, the Gundestrup Cauldron is the largest and finest example of Iron Age European silverwork (diameter: 69 cm (27 in); height: 42 cm (17 in.). Despite being discovered inDenmark, the workmanship and iconography on the cauldron indicate that it originated on the Balkans, either among the Thraco-Celtic (Scordisci) or possibly Celto-Scythian (Bastarnae) tribes, although the exact date and location of production is still uncertain.
The Gundestrup Cauldron
Antlered deity on Plate A of the Gundestrup cauldron, identified with the Celtic God Cernunnos, holding a ram-horned serpent and torc.
https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/cernunnos-and-the-ram-headed-serpent/
Celtic carnyx players depicted on Plate E of the Cauldron
https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/the-boar-headed-carnyx/
X-radiograph of inner plate C 6575 showing details of traces from working tools.
The ‘Gundestrup Ghosts’
While extensive academic attention has been paid to the cauldron’s iconography and origin over the past century…
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CERNUNNOS AND THE RAM-HEADED SERPENT
In contrast to other creatures, depictions of the ram in Celtic art are comparatively rare. For example, on fibulae with zoomorphic decoration less than 2% feature the ram, and in the vast majority of cases where the animal is represented it is most often the head alone, naturalistic or schematically, which is portrayed (see: Cluytens M. (2009) Réflexions sur la symbolique du bélier chez les Celtes protohistoriques à travers les représentations figurées, Lunula. Archaeologia protohistorica 17, 201-206).
Fibula from the burial of a Celtic woman at Orainville (Aisne), France (bronze/coral) decorated with ram head motif (300-275 BC)
Zoomorphic/ram head attachment from a Celtic (Scordisci) firepot from Boznik (Pernik region), Bulgaria (late 2nd / early 1st century BC)
https://www.academia.edu/5046182/Zoomorphic_Cult_Firepots
Danubian kantharos with ram head handles from the burial of a Celtic woman at Csobaj, (Kom. Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén), Hungary
(3rd c. BC)
https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/the-archaeology-of-heads/
The head of the…
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“Uncertain Times” Book launch
My first collection of poetry “Uncertain Times”. A book launch at Octavo in West Bute Street, Cardiff on Friday 23rd September 2016 at 7pm. Mike Jenkins Red Poets, Suzanne Ioppa poet and Rhys Milsom poet will also be reading. Cara Cullen and Fiona Cullen will be singing and playing. Come along and enjoy! There’ll be an Open Mic.
Crooked bird
Crooked bird
The word used was scoliosis
A curvature of the spine
That led to three days a week in the clinic
The straight backed women wore
Starched white coats and eyes of coldness
Eyes that are blank cold
Give out that signal
Eyes that told us be careful
We walked into bare white walled rooms
Yellow pine floors narrow high windows
Our mothers sat unknowing outside
The room swam with the sickening smell
Of pine maybe carbolic disinfectant
One wall was lined with wooden bars
Yellow pine bars from the floor to the ceiling
We were told
Take off your clothes
Except for underwear
So we sat silently on the benches
A line of crooked birds
We were told to climb the bars
Take our feet off the bars
And hang by our hands
And stare at the opposite wall.
It was a place to straighten out
The crookedness of our crooked backs
We were small thin young children
We did what we were told
We shared this endurance silently
We shared our bravery in silence too
Our courage with stubbornness
So we hung from the bars to straighten
Our crooked backs like birds on a wire
Hanging out stretched
Our arms aching
When the pain of stretching
Made us cry
Tears brushed away with our own hands
On to bodices and vests
There was no warmth here
The quietness of endurance
We share, fades, spills
On the floor and disappears
It was a place to stretch the curve
And crookedness out of us
We were told to lie
Flat on the yellow wood floor
To flatten and straighten
Those who were unable
Had braces fixed
To their backs
Braces fixed to backs
To straighten
Crooked birds
And so it went on
Year after year
Straightening crooked birds
The walk home was best
A wagon wheel or malt-teasers
A treat for a crooked bird’s braveness
We crooked birds observe
The world at a different angle
We learn to think
Out of the box
Straightened people
Try to fix us in
It is like a fixation straight people have
To make everything the same
And if you don’t fit
You’re just not the same
A reject?
But crooked birds have a different habit
Of turning the world upside down
Looking from a different direction
Giving something more to life
To a world that’s become monochrome
In its drabness
So let’s go on breaking down the walls of boxes.
RAC
Debasis Mukhopadhyay
That Watching is Harder than to Asphyxiate [For Quandeel Baloch (Fauzia Azeem), the 26 years old Pakistani model, actress, feminist activist & social media star who was asphyxiated on July 15, …
Source: Debasis Mukhopadhyay
Celfypridd 