MARY COURTNEY
ART - POETRY
drawing n digital with a poetic twist
Sneaky Arsenic
Domestic caterpillar of the community
Slides 2-8 are Pics by Dave Warren of the Wordrobe
Domestic caterpillar of the community,
You'll invite her in
Share a pot of piping tea
Chit chat about the weather
And she'll nibble away innocuously -
Right before you notice
Her one gurning eyeball -
Your head's on a paper doily platter
Your face a lattice for worms
Sneaky Arsenic
Freedom
No longer in knots
No longer slave to the neck
Long lost tongue is found
Moon-Brain
Serpent Sea, Seething Bay, Lake of Sorrow, Lake of Joy, Bay of Rainbows... are all places on the moon.
Moon-Brain is a poem based on names of places on the moon, the landscape of our emotional states. The image of neurones, turned by encircling, into a moon, was the inspiration for the poem. (From the film "A being Objective" made with Laurence Campbell.)
(Note: contains flashing images).
"I get a real buzz from writing poems......
But equally enjoy encouraging people to play with words themselves, often through bringing art and poetry together".
The Wordrobe
A naked wardrobe lands in a Library.
Together we transformed it into a Wordrobe
- a Narnia of masks and tie-snakes, a home for poems and speaking clothes, tie-pots, a tie-tyger, and a kingdom for a budgie. The Wordrobe (click here to see it), really captured imaginations, bringing together discarded clothes, scores of new poems, people of all ages and their abundance of creativity.
The Singing Sock
So sang the Singing Sock of Spon End
Spin me a yarn or something pretend
A tale of an ogre or hot blooded toad
The tail of a mouth that runs under the road
Made as an example for a poetry workshop in a primary school. Christopher Sidwell brought it (with additional verses) unexpectedly to life in song. The Singing Sock has since sung on BBC radio!
Children's Poems on the Pavement
30 poems by children from Spon Gate Primary about their area, were chalked on the pavement by Sustrans for the Spon Spun Festival.
Tiptoe
I mean how can you tiptoe round that one
introduce it slyly, shyly into conversation
Oh by the way whilst I think of it
would you mind
waiting whilst we tiptoe round his bed full of
efficiency keeping his blood pressure primed
to the level that his vital organs remain vital
would you mind
awfully thinking of someone else at this time
perhaps several who are tiptoeing round death
who could benefit from the end of this suspense
would you mind
awfully donating the organs of your loved one
whose stem has just died or should I say your
loved one who is tiptoeing between death and life
would you mind
I wrote this recollecting memories of working in Intensive Care as a nurse, looking after patients awaiting brain stem death testing.
I was Born. Story of the Birth of Triplets 90 years ago
This family heirloom is the true story of the birth of the McMahon triplets in the West of Ireland, over 90 years ago. Told to me by my Aunty Mary, the eldest triplet (here in the middle of this photograph). The story was told to her by her mother, and like all good stories, has been passed on.
I was born, as told by Mary Reidy, Nee McMahon
I was born the 6th of June 1923, in the heart of Clouncuneen.
And my mother gave birth to triplets, two boys and a girl.
Me and Pat were born this evening at 4 o'clock
and my other brother was born the following day, at 4 o' clock.
And Dr Hickey that delivered us at the birth said,
“Well Mrs McMahon”, he said, “I'll be down tomorrow at 4 o' clock
and the third child will be born”.
And my father was out in the road, and he see'd the car coming down the heighth.
And my mother says to him, “Well doctor, she says. “A miracle,
she says to him, that I should have triplets, three babies”.
“Well, Mrs McMahon, he said, God's will is no miracle.
”And when we were born, my grandmother was there in the house,
my mother's mother. And there was two or three women
in the kitchen waiting for the good news, that everything was alright.
And she brought me and Pat out in her two hands - and showed us
to the women in the kitchen and she said, “O' thiarna tŕocaire. God keep us”.
And Dr Hickey put the three afterbirths up on the table and they examined them.
And we were very hard to manage, we were so tiny.
We had to be wrapped in baize, each one of us, for three months.
We couldn't be dressed. And we had a cradle. And the three of us was in the one cradle.
And I was in the middle and the two boys were one side of me.
And my mother cut up a sheet, a flannelette sheet, and made squares of it.
And she'd hem 'em and put them under our arses.
There was no powder to be got that time, no baby powder.
She'd put a saucer of flour down on the griddle and brown it.
Keep turning it. And she'd take it up, bring it to a box. Leave it cool.
And my mother had a set of triplets
and she had two sets of twins
and she had seven children in four years and a half
and she had four singles after that.
The Story of 800
Out of the blankness of nothing came four zeros.
Eyes in flying saucers of bewilderment.
And they looked 'round, but couldn't see, until two
became spectacled and two monocled.
And they adjusted their view. But after a while
became accustomed and no longer saw anything new.
And so zeros became telescopes. And the sun
and the moon and shooting stars enveloped them.
And as the far drew near they became accustomed
and no longer saw anything new.
So they turned then to eyes of a microscope
and the near changed; into a most curious stranger.
And they saw cells and the nucleus of cells and all
the circles we are made of. With eyes refreshed, zeros
were everywhere. In straggles of hair and sticks of chalk.
In transverse section, bronchioles, for air to talk.
In rolls of papyrus, neurones and old bones.
In oak trees, battered coins, bath-pipes and tins of peas.
And the zeros glimpsed their arc of possibility.
And two tried seeing themselves new.
One balanced on top
of the other, to become an infinity.
A figure of eight.
The dance of perpetual quest.
And the other two grew,
in the knowledge of infinite possibility.
And this is how the story of 800 began.
Feeling Trapped (A True Story)
Jonathan Trappe had a dream, sitting in his office swivel chair,
gazing vacantly out of the window. He imagined taking to the air.
Just taking off; buying fifty-five huge helium balloons;
a fantasia of reds, whites, greens, yellows and blues.
And he saw himself in slow motion frames, inflating each one,
tying each with string, hefting a huge clod of a stone to put on
the swivel seat, so that the balloons wouldn’t lift it away,
not yet, at any rate; not until all fifty-five were tied in place.
A cacophony on the arms of his chair, a bored filing cabinet grey.
And then he imagined easing the stone off, right down to the date.
He could see it now. Raleigh, North Carolina, June 7th, 2008.
Early morning, commute time to work, half past eight.
And that was it. He decided this dream could not be late.
And so he left for a coffee break and walked at brisk pace
to a shop in the town centre, staring at his reflection facing
him in the window, beyond to the bright glare of party games;
striding in, he picked fifty-five huge helium balloons; matter of factly
paying for them, with no fuss, like it was an everyday activity.
The next day, he left work , and took to the air, in his office chair.
Commended in the National Poetry Competition
The UK's largest poetry competition