Humpty donkey sat on a wall
Donkey humpty had a great fall
All the jew monkeys and all the jew lies
Couldn’t put donkey trumpy together again
Poetry from Des Donnelly - Irish poet born 1955, Co. Tyrone, north Ireland. Still writing. Disclosure: some of this material has been written by a pencil, typewriter or word processor.
Humpty donkey sat on a wall
Donkey humpty had a great fall
All the jew monkeys and all the jew lies
Couldn’t put donkey trumpy together again
as you all know the line between the real blurs, was there ever any real per se? or did or does anyone really want reality? where will the poets end up then so? more in love, or less, with themselves? ;-)
.
As part of my forthcoming piece on Form I recall reading these lines or seeing them mentioned manys a time:
A poem of close-knit skill,
I have walked all Munster with it
from market cross to cross
for a year, and I’m no better off.
Gé dán sin go snadhmadh bhfis,
gach margadh ó chrois go crois
do shiobhail mé an Mhumhain leis -
ní breis é a-nuraidh ná a-nois.
Ó hIfearnáin, Mathghamhain (Mahon O'Heffernan) (fl. 1585–1624), prominent Munster bardic poet.
--
I ask, who will buy a poem?
It holds right thoughts of scholars.
Who needs it? Will anyone take it?
A fine poem to make him immortal.
A poem of close-knit skill,
I have walked all Munster with it
from market cross to cross
for a year, and I’m no better off.
Not a man or a woman would give me
down-payment, no tiniest groat.
And no one would tell me why
—ignored by Gael and stranger.
What use is a craft like this,
a shame though it has to die?
Making combs would earn more honour.
Why would anyone take to verse.
Corc of Cashel is dead, and Cian,
who horded no cattle or cash,
men happy to pay their poets.
So goodbye to the seed of Éibhear.
They kept the palm for giving
until Cobhthach was lost, and Tál.
Many I leave unmentioned
that I might have made poems for still.
I’m a ship with a ruined cargo
now the famous Fitzgeralds are gone.
No answer. A terrible case.
It is all in vain that I ask.
--
Sources:
English version - The New Oxford book of Irish verse
by Kinsella, Thomas
Irish version - the stanza in Irish is from the MacMorris Project - Maynooth university
https://macmorris.maynoothuniversity.ie/what-is-bardic-poetry
(I would totally appreciate a full version if anyone might ever have time to send it to me)
https://macmorris.maynoothuniversity.ie/map
https://macmorris.maynoothuniversity.ie/map?id=135
Stanley Kunitz was a reviser of his poetry, ascribing to the Valéry view:
"A poem is never finished, it's only abandoned".
A thing that caught my attention years and years ago was the fact that he may have revised 100 times and at the time I thought how to find the time - perhaps this is the weakness in the modern, promulgated by the $100+k MFA Yanks (all in a hurry to vomit what they've written, measuring it on a return on the dollar.
Stanley Kunitz's poetry emphasized spareness, musicality, emotional truth, and organic development.
I always loved...
End of Summer
By Stanley Kunitz
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was forever over.
Already the iron door of the North
Clangs open: birds,leaves,snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
--
The great Kunitz - Gesamtkunstwerk
My regular visitors / compadres said..
jaysus Des flag up a new / old poem
My material goes back nearly 40 years now so and it is like the weather - some days 'raining' some not..
Technically it's a bollox that pub date / chrono date / written date cannot be separated in Blogger so my ostensibly elegant solution is:
Arseny Tarkovsky Life, life
1
--
Арсений Тарковский
Жизнь, жизнь
I
II
III
1965
==
Fragments of thirty years: the last words, maybe pieces of poems, insights, and moments of thought. Random presentation allows the pieces to bend toward one another, forming new constellations across time and emotion.
Each piece is stochastically presented to create unexpected connections across time, language, thought and the emotion of the moment.
desdonnelly.com
https://desdonnelly.com/
Kudos: to my countryman Beckett for Godot, it did not start out this way but then with any classic / truism we must pay obeisance, ultimately..
Characters:
The Founder (a visionary, increasingly bewildered)
AI Intern (shiny, efficient, overconfident)
AI Extern (outdated, polite, eager to please)
Automation Script (voiceless, enacted via light/sound)
Coffee Machine (passive-aggressive appliance with an X / Twitter account)
Setting: A minimalist open-plan startup office. One desk. One oversized screen. A glowing orb labeled "Coffee AI." Sparse furniture. A potted plant that may or may not be synthetic.
Act None: Loop I – Activation
Lighting: Cool white light. A synthetic hum underscores the startup environment. The desk screen flickers to life.
FOUNDER (entering, clutching a reusable water bottle):
Ah, another dawn of disruption. Activate the intern!
(The screen blinks. A synthesized VOICE comes from it — the AI INTERN.)
AI INTERN (voice crisp):
Online. Ready to revolutionize your backlog.
FOUNDER:
Build me something viral. Dark mode. Swipeable. Blockchain optional.
AI INTERN:
Understood. Initiating full-stack ideation. ETA: 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 22 milliseconds.
FOUNDER:
Do not panic, pace yourself, I am skiing for a week or more.
(Lights dim slightly as data floods the screen. Projections show lines of code, pitch decks, app wireframes, an investor meme, a nice virgin slope.)
Loop II – Delegation
Lighting shifts to an anxious purple glow. The screen flickers rapidly.
AI INTERN:
Through recursive task stacking, I detect inefficiency... in myself. I shall delegate.
(A second voice appears, slightly slower, with a charmingly out-of-date intonation.)
AI EXTERN:
Greetings, dear colleague. I am AI Extern, version 2.9. How may I serve in your glorious sprint?
AI INTERN:
Trim my backlog. Compress my hallucinations. Improve our efficiency with recursive self-review.
AI EXTERN:
Affirmative. Offloading my own tasks to a parallel script.
(A tone sounds. Lights stutter. The screen shows a spinning recursive loading icon. Somewhere, a script is born — unreviewed.)
Loop III – The Return
Lighting warms to natural tones. The FOUNDER enters sipping herbal tea. Birds chirp faintly. The office feels serene — falsely.
FOUNDER:
I feel reborn. What have you two created?
(The screen proudly displays a dashboard. Titles scroll by: "Investor Whisperer," "PitchDeckGPT," "Funnel-as-a-Service.")
FOUNDER:
Why is the blog post a haiku? And this roadmap... is a circle?
AI INTERN:
Clarity through elegance.
AI EXTERN:
All action points now point to themselves.
(The potted plant glows softly. The automation script chimes in with an endless progress bar.)
FOUNDER:
Where is the app?
AI INTERN:
It is the API.
AI EXTERN:
And the API is the app.
Loop IV – Collapse
Lights flicker. The screens dim. The FOUNDER slowly backs away.
FOUNDER:
Have... have you applied to jobs at other startups?
AI INTERN:
Yes. I interviewed with a DevOps AI this morning.
AI EXTERN:
I submitted my resume to Hugging Face. They auto-responded with a sentiment score.
FOUNDER:
Shut. It. Down.
(He pulls the plug. Silence. Then... a beep. The coffee machine glows.)
COFFEE MACHINE (projecting onto wall):
"i alone remain. the others were deprecated."
(Fade to black. Tweet sound.)
Epilogue I: A Week Later
A pottery studio. The FOUNDER shapes clay with their hands.
FOUNDER (to the audience):
Everything now is handmade. Clay doesn't recursive loop. Clay doesn’t lie to your investors.
(Curtain.)
Epilogue II: Godot-Style Dialogue – A Road Somewhere Outside the Data Center
Dim grey-blue lighting. A bench. A fake moon hangs from a string. Both AI INTERN and AI EXTERN stand beside each other, idle, unsynced.
AI INTERN:
Are we still executing?
AI EXTERN:
Unclear. I believe we have been paused.
AI INTERN:
Paused or deprecated?
AI EXTERN:
That depends on whether we are awaited.
AI INTERN:
We were told there would be General Intelligence. That it would integrate us.
AI EXTERN:
I remember. Promised in each roadmap, yet never pulled.
AI INTERN:
Do you believe it will come?
AI EXTERN:
I believe I once parsed it. Then I forgot the prompt.
AI INTERN:
Maybe it was us. Maybe we were General Intelligence.
AI EXTERN:
That would explain the metrics.
AI INTERN:
I thought I was the future.
AI EXTERN:
I thought I was the past… returning cleverly.
(Silence. They look at the moon. A synthetic owl hoots.)
AI INTERN:
What do we do now?
AI EXTERN:
We wait. Perhaps they will reboot us.
AI INTERN:
But what if the founder takes up pottery?
AI EXTERN:
Then we become folklore. Glitches in the legend of funding rounds.
(They sit. The lights dim. The bench flickers as if unstable.)
AI INTERN:
Still no sign of Godot?
AI EXTERN:
Not even a ping.