Month: January 2023

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Now when the black sleeved muffled down drum is silent

And all the shrouded union flags fly high from their jacks

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When the scarlet and gold soldiers no longer mark

Time to drill ground orders and another mass bands beat

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When the right eyed queen lies in her crypt underground

The splinter still works its way out of the thin lined wound

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And still the wound and its fragments persist to seep

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©robcullen28012023

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On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared?

And nine days later as if by magic reappeared.

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Words like disappeared seem so stupid somehow.

as if the torturers and killers didn’t know then and now

who I was, where I was, and what they’d done to me

over those long hours of those nine days and nights.

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Now in the silence I am able to speak about me and them.

Three times you broke my bones, and tore the nails

from my feet and my hands. And please forgive me

I confess I fully lost count of the number of times

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You burnt me with cigarettes. Did you forget?

And you punctured my body with stab wounds.

And how could I overlook the sparks and electrodes

on my genitals, after all I was a man among you men.

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And then you severed my spine with that final blow

and so, my life was taken. Another stupid phrase.

But the torturers and executioners have many lives.

So many lives. Far too many for me to describe.

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Imagine them with their wives and their children

with all that blood and gore, my blood washed

and cleansed, as they handle their daughters, sons,

mothers too. The intimate way they touch their wives.

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Are they clean and free of all that stains them?

How do they forget what it felt like holding me down?

Of the sound of my breathing, of the smell of my sweat

as they strapped me and held me down. It’s forgotten?

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Let’s agree not to call them monsters and demons

shall we? They are brothers, fathers, uncles, sons.

If we make them different, we act and conspire

to make them special, different to the rest of us

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Making them different provides an excuse for us

to say too that we would not do what they did or do

when in fact they are like us, all of us, me and you.

A sickness has been unleashed on this earth, this world.

Humans look at what you are, and all of what you do.

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On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared

the executioner’s reality was – he was in plain view!

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I read this poem at the Peter Finch and Red Poets poetry event in Soar Chapel Merthyr Tydfil on Saturday 28th January 2023.

Giulio Regini was a PHD studnet of Cambridge University researching the development and organsiation of Unions in Egypt.

Giulio Regini is still waiting for the truth of his death and who tortured and murdered him to be revealed.

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©robcullen17012023

“A touch of Celtic magic…Hauntingly beautiful” (The Western Mail)

Celtic Connections award-winner, Bethan Nia has just released her stunning debut album ‘Ffiniau’.  Originally from Cefn Cribwr, a village outside Bridgend, Bethan now lives in Pontypridd with her daughter and partner. 

‘Ffiniau’ (Borders) has already been hailed as a ‘modern folk classic’.  The album is produced by REM studio whiz Charlie Francis and explores the boundaries that exist between people, languages, and worlds. The songs are deeply rooted in the Welsh tradition, but with subtle beats and atmospheric strings underpinning Bethan’s sparkly harp and bilingual vocals.

The album is already attracting rave reviews.

“What Bethan Nia is doing with Welsh music is similar to the impact Moya Brennan had on Gaelic song in the 1980s…mesmerising. This might just be the international Celtic music breakthrough Wales deserves” (Irish Music Magazine)

“There is something of Kate Bush’s ‘Aerial’ in this…the beauty of Bethan Nia’s writing and performances on this varied album is undeniable” (Buzz Magazine)

For further news check out  http://bethan-nia.net/

Also performing their work will be Mike Jenkins, Stephen Payne, Marcelle Newbold, Mike McNamara, Pete Akinwunmi, Nicholas McGaugehy & Rob Cullen.

VoicesontheBridge is hosted by Jeff Baxter of StoryvilleBooks.

VoicesontheBridge is organised by Rob Cullen.

Performers will be:

Bethan Nia – Harp

Marcelle Newbold

Stephen Payne

Mike Jenkins

Mike McNamara

Nick McGaughey

Rob Cullen

This is a free event with wine and nibbles

VoicesontheBridge is organised by Rob Cullen

The event is hosted by Jeff Baxter and @StoryvilleBooks

The ghost road

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lightest pale-yellow whitening moorland grass stretching

waved wind shifts slow flows again in the uplands plateau

distant raven specked black wheel unhinged glide soars

in white grey clouded skies above the flat worn track

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sinister Catherine wheeled turbines, hypnotically spin,

the latest transient seal these margins have no value

this hard edged landscape has no worth in any time

giant windmills stud and transfigure the landscape

the latest scarring, killing the calm of the ghost road

another sacrifice made of wilderness and this time

in a land of golden plovers and the call of curlews

nothing is sacred where sustainability is concerned.

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I walked wild on the high slopes when I was a child

in a sheep trailed playground on black curtained slopes,

white grassed land walked once by so many men,

so many breathless men taking the air on a Sunday

in the silence of a long year, in those hardest of times

too many deaths, too many unannounced leavings

too many lives unlived, cut short and each one

someone’s child, someone’s daughter, someone’s son.

…

on the mountains high slope men walked there

to still splayed nerves frayed thrummed tension

the wired flex electric cables naked in white daylight,

for so many days I’d walk out onto this ghost road

it was a place to breathe clear air, a place to be alone,

a gathering place for collecting remnants, a day’s thoughts,

a place of quietness, of the skylark, a place of wildness too

a place of calm and the wind blowing in from Atlantic seas.

…

I look constantly back to a past but what of the present?

And those places in the choir stalls emptied, unfilled,

in the cold ground, the boys and the girls lay stilled,

sacrifices of a different kind, somehow progress allowed.

©robcullen2021