Last week Sally and I took in a couple of events at the Belfast Book Festival. The first was a superb interview with Ian Rankin. The second, was a series of film-poems entitled "Translating /City", which given my own artistic and urban ministry leanings, Sally thought would have been right up my proverbial... However it actually left both of us a little non-plussed. Some of the pieces were interesting but others were either underwhelming, or a full blown exercise in filming the Emperor sashaying up the red carpet in his new clothes... or perhaps we are simply artistic Philistines...
One of the more inspired and inspiring pieces was "A Blessing Of The Boats By The Village Mothers" taking words by Donegal poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin and marrying them to the sound and visuals of artist Laura Sheeran. It is based on old Irish blessings and was a site-specific arts collaboration drawing on stories of Fanad Lighthouse where it was first shown as part of the Eargail Arts Festival in 2021... However in both the programme and the title page of the film there was a typo renaming it as "A Blessing of the Boasts." This sent me on an unexpected mental journey during some of the subsequent less engaging film-poems, and afterwards. Some of this was additionally shaped by the oft repeated idea that "it takes a village to raise a child" and a twitter spat between Jess Phillips MP and another mother over the difference between pride in and over-indulgence of children by their mothers and the implications of that for their children in adulthood.
That resulted in this...
The boasts of village mothers are indeed a blessing
Although an often unacknowledged one,
Endowing their offspring with
Skins like ox-hides, bound by
Strong seams of confidence;
Stitching a coracle to carry them
Through otherwise unfordable torrents,
Or, Brendan-like, traverse unimaginable oceans.
Selah
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