WHAT an honour it was for me to read one of my favourite poems, 'Love after Love', by Derek Walcott at the New Script Travelling Apothecary event at the Kennedy centre as we celebrated Poetry Day.
My good friend, Texas Poet laureate Jenny Browne, graced us with her presence and read to the audience Seamus Heaney’s poem 'Postscript'.
Sara Boyce, who should be called Sara Voice, serenaded everyone with a couple of beautiful Irish ballads.
Shoppers were able to peruse the New Script Apothecary – a pharmacy of poetry that provides medicine for the soul. Other members of the group were on standby to enlighten people on the need for a New Script for a New Belfast and a New Ireland, as we know the old script is obsolete.
In the beautiful handmade Travelling Apothecary there are small medicine bottles, each containing a poem that can ease and nourish the soul in times of need.
Somehow the magic of poetry infiltrates the stresses and strains of the suffering that we endure from time to time in an unrelenting world of chaos, instability and uncertainty. The pain that only poets know how to put into words that can liberate us from our internal struggle and fill us with hope that together we can and will bring about change for the greater good.
I met Jenny through another mutual friend, the famous Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who is a wonderful friend of Belfast and a supporter of New Script. Naomi’s poem 'Kindness' is my prayer. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to do so. We all know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Kindness and that in itself is good medicine.
Putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is extremely therapeutic both in good times and bad. New Script continue to bring great mental health speakers both locally and from far afield to enlighten us on the need for good mental health and show ways of how what we now call 'Talking Therapies' can improve our wellbeing, along with diet and physical exercise and, of course, my own personal favourite – Mindfulness Practice.
New Script invites you to sign up and become a member and enjoy the connection of community, to avail of their support as we travel the new road of recovery and as we recover our god-given right to be happy and to be free.
Here’s a spoonful of poetic medicine:
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
