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A fair bit of both methinks.
Sunshine
SunshineSunshine
SunshineI was lost between the midnight and the dawning
In a place of no consequence or company
3:33 when the numbers fell off the clock face
Speed dialling with no signal at allGo
Shout it out
Rise upEscape yourself
And gravity
Hear me
Cease to speak
That I may speak
Shush nowForce quit
And move to trashI was right there at the top of the bottom
On the edge of the known universe
Where I wanted to be
I had driven to the scene of the accident
And I sat there waiting for meRestart
And
Reboot yourself
You’re free to goShout for joy
If you get the chance
Password
You
Enter here
Right nowYou know your name
So punch it in
Hear me
Cease to speak
That I may speak
Shush nowDon’t move
Or say a thingClassic stuff 8)
@pete wrote:
At Rouen in English-controlled Normandy, Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who became the savior of France, is burned at the stake for heresy.
All the banners stop waving
And the flags stop flying
And the silence comes over
Thousands of soldiers
Thousands of soldiersWho is that girl? Do I know her face?
Who is that girl?Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross
And she looks so beautiful in her armour
Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God
And she never wears a ring on her fingerAll the cannon are firing
And the swords are clashing
And the horses are charging
And the flags are flying
And the battle is raging
And the bells, the bells are ringingWho is that girl? Do I know her face?
Who is that girl?Joanni, Joanni wears a golden cross
And she looks so beautiful in her armour
Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God
And she never wears a ring on her finger
Joanni, Joanni, Joanni, Joanni blows a kiss to God
And she just looks beautiful in her armour
Beautiful in her armourElle parle à Dieu et aux anges dans ses prières
Venez Sainte Catherine et Sainte Marguerite,
Elle a besoin de vous deux.
Ah les voix, les voix du feu,
Chante avec moi petite soeur,
J’entends les voix, les voix.
He was born in the dying days.
It was the withering end of 1896. He was called William after the long-dead Orange King, because his father took an interest in such distant matters. On top of that, an old great-uncle, William Cullen, was yet living in Wicklow, across the mountains as they used to say, where his father himself had been reared.
The winter sleet bit into the Dublin cab-men, where they gathered in their mucky gabardines by the Round Room in Great Britain Street. The stony face of the old building remained indifferent, with its strange decoration of ox-skulls and draperies.
The new babies screeched inside the thick grey walls of the Rotunda Hospital. Blood gathered on the nurses’ white laps like the aprons of butchers.
He was a little baby and would be always a little boy. He was like the thin upper arm of a beggar with a few meagre bones shot through him, provisional and bare.
When he broke from his mother he made a mewling sound like a wounded cat, over and over.
That was the night of a storm that would not be a famous storm. But, for all that, it rattled the last leaves out of the regal oaks in the old pleasure gardens behind the hospital, and it drove the wet harvest along the gutters and into the gaping drains and down into the unknown avenues of the great sewers. The blood of births was sluiced down there too, and all the many liquids of humanity, but the salt sea at Ringsend took everything equally.
His mother took him to her breast with the exhausted will that makes heroes of most mothers. The fathers stood well away, taking a beer in the Ship Hotel. The century was old and weak, but the men spoke of horses and taxes. A baby knows nothing, and Willie knew nothing, but he was like a scrap of a song nonetheless, a point of light in the sleety darkness, a beginning.And all those boys of Europe born in those times, and thereabouts those times, Russian, French, Belgian, Serbian, Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Italian, Prussian, German, Austrian, Turkish – and Canadian, Australian, American, Zulu, Gurkha, Cossack, and all the rest – their fate was written in a ferocious chapter of the book of life, certainly. Those millions of mothers and their million gallons of mothers’ milk, millions of instances of small-talk and baby-talk, beatings and kisses, ganseys and shoes, piled up in history in great ruined heaps, with a loud and broken music, human stories told for nothing, for ashes, for death’s amusement, flung on the mighty scrapheap of souls, all those million boys in all their humours to be milled by the mill-stones of a coming war.
So read the opening lines of Sebastian Barry’s masterpiece, first published in 2005 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Although losing out that year to another astonishing work – THE SEA by fellow Irishman John Banville, A LONG LONG WAY is an unforgettable experience charting heartbreaking division, unspeakable loss and the ultimate glory of artistic and imaginative redemption against the horrific backdrop of one of the bloodiest conflicts brought to the planet by man.
Young Willie Dunne marches into war with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, an Irishman fighting for the allied cause, just as trouble festers in his own homeland, culminating in the 1916 Easter Rising rebellion and the Irish Proclamation of Independence from Britain.
Where the most stringent loyalties are tested all round, from family and loved ones to patriotic duty, not only do the soul destroying trenches of World War 1 Europe hold deathly sway, but the entrenchment of spirit and thought itself. Mass carnage and collective sacrifice across Europe for a war fought to protect small nations running parallel to political upheaval, war and uprising in an Ireland seeking self determination itself.
At times almost unbearably savage, at times tearfully tender. Screaming and unflinching, yet elegant and beautiful.. A LONG LONG WAY is a work of intense humanity. Resonant and authentic.‘A stunning achievement.’
SUNDAY TRIBUNE‘A LONG LONG WAY is soaked in blood, semen, excrement and filth. Yet it still manages to retain an elegiac, trance-like elegance..
Through this richly textured language, Barry creates for Willie Dunne a no-man’s land unlike any other. It stretches, not just between the British and German lines, but between the man he becomes at war and everything he knows and loves. He loses his country, the girl he loves, and even his father, who is horrified by Willie’s ambivalent sympathy for the executed Dublin rebels. With no world in which to live, he becomes a kind of ghost even before he is dead. It is Barry’s heartbreaking achievement not to exorcise that ghost, but to allow it to haunt us with the unspeakable sorrow of an irreparable loss.’
GUARDIAN‘One of the great books about the First World War, which escapes and transcends any merely Irish dimension or location. The Boston Globe called A LONG LONG WAY a masterpiece. It is a judgement that is hard to fault.’
THE IRISH TIMES‘What happened to the Irishmen fighting for the King in France when their countrymen in Dublin rose up against the British in 1916? That’s the intriguing question at the heart of this understated, beautifully written story…
Strong stuff, as powerful in it’s own way as the trench memoirs of Sassoon and Graves.’
DAILY MAIL‘Barry’s excellent novel sets the trauma of trench warfare against a background of confused allegiance, yet above all it is a cry of grief for the huge desolation of war itself.’
METRO‘Because his prose is exquisite and because his mind is relentless in lifting every last clod of thought and exploring beneath it, his mission works. Works like a spell… A LONG LONG WAY is an infinitely apt title for this evocative, searching, nudging, niggling novel.’
IRISH INDEPENDENT‘In darkly beautiful, inventive and evocative prose Barry tells the filthy truths of war.’
IRELAND ON SUNDAY‘The story grips, shocks and saddens; but most importantly refuses to be forgotten.’
THE TIMES‘The most remarkable shared imaginative universe in Irish writing belongs to the poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry who, like an archaeologist, has slowly and deftly delved back through his myriad ancestors to let them breathe again… A LONG LONG WAY is a major novel… perhaps his greatest work.’
SUNDAY INDEPENDENTSebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955.
Definitely NOT the French one (for obvious reasons)..
The contenders from Japan and Argentina look promising.. but I went with Brazilian Salsa :P
RICHARD WAGNER born in 1813.
The composer favoured by Adolph Hitler
Perhaps the most powerful pieces ever written..
DAS RHEINGOLD – Entrance Of The Gods Into Valhalla
DIE WALKURE – Wotan’s Farewell
And this is certainly the most passionate..
Hope you had a great day Rock Robster m8 :P
