Day 3 of Street Line Critics On Tour in Helsinki. Some fantastic contributions from our Street Line network and some very inspirational additions from passers-by.
Featured Pieces:
“If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
Wendell Berry – Selected by Rochus van der Vaart
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Almost Time To Change
What is this?
A girl crying at the edge of the night
With a scissors in her hands
A father running through the firefight with his baby in his arms,
Tell me what it is?
And how could you expect anyone to forgive
Or understand
When heaven and hell
And all those kind of things are
At your command
Tell me jesus
How humanities little man lies face down washed up on the sand,
When time began, was this fate?
Are you fucking there at all?
How can you expect to forgive or understand
When heaven and hell and all those kinds of things
are at your command
Cormac Lyons
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A stop sign with the words” just be” ,all around it where the red is usually. (Just be and stop in Finnish?)
Kieran Carey
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Passing Through Places
On uncomfortable
Mounted plastic chairs
Making rows of seats
To watch train races
From besides leg-bopping
Paper readers
With grim paper faces
Sits a young boy
Wonder at the world
Reflected in blue eyes
As mother searches frantically
For the ticket stump
Lost somewhere in the
Depths of a designer purse
Unlike him
She’s unaware
Of the spillage of
An ever-busy society
Pouring out of
Mechanical snakes
Headed heedless to
Fulfil already lost pledges
To heartless concrete creditors
They’re just
Rushing by people in
Passing through places
Unaware of
The boy with the blue eyes
Who holds the wonder at the world
In the clutching slippery paws of
Childhood
For as long as he can
Before the tidal waves of
Societal sewage
Has him jaded, fumbling
For a ticket stump
To take him somewhere
To forget the
Rushing by person
In the now littered
Passing through place
In his chest
The yellowed ticket
A promise of
Letting him tend to
Long lost pledges
Made to satisfy
The stranger spouse
Who’d left
Without ever being there at all
And maybe then, he’ll become
Just another one
Of those heedless, empty
But content
Rushing by people in
Passing through places
Ethan Glavin
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‘It’s only a job’ – Elaine Reidy
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FINLAND
Tiny fish
In a low – light land
Land of fins
Land of bells
Millions of tiny fish
Live again
Slipping through
Your fingers
I love those tiny fish
Swimming into words
I love those little fish
In Finland.
Brendan Hayes
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“The tired old story of a city’s first Starbucks.”
Chris Hayes
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The Handbag Shaped Like a Gull
Excuse me sir, but have you seen a woman
with a handbag shaped like a gull?
She would have been holding it by the tip
of its wing, and from its beak it would be
spilling the sky. If you see her enter
the underpass, do not enter after her.
Do not reach for the sky that spills
from her handbag, for it will slice
the ends off your fingers. She keeps
the sea deep in that handbag too,
and a thick sediment of money.
Be warned if you see sediment spilling
from the eye of that handbag shaped
like a gull. That is no money that you
can spend, but the blindness you get
from looking down from above.
The woman with the handbag shaped
like a gull is late for a meeting. The meeting
she is late for is the person she meets
on the way to the trains. Do not meet her.
Excuse me, my darling, but have you seen a woman
with a handbag shaped like a gull?
John W. Sexton
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The Love we withhold is
The pain that we carry.
Paul Massey
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A place that transports you anywhere. An instant TGV through Europe to the US, from the home of Nokia – staying connected at high speed – with your family at home, knowing you are safe.
Gerard Garrett
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‘When the wind is low and the sun is high, with our backs held straight, facing the sky, stepping cautiously into a land unknown, soul beside soul, I know I’ve found home, exploring the world, our eyes at their best , looking for that one place to make our nest , let us sit alone, with the seasons passing us by, into our autumn years, looking back on a life full of highs.’
Patrick McElligott
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‘Wrapped in a blanket of hope, asleep in a bed of dreams, my step into eternity is not what it might have been’
Kylie Minogue – selected by Patrick McElligott
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Church of Rock
(Temppeliaukio Kirkko)
A spaceship descended
Onto the centre of earth
And beneath its
Disc of copper wire
Crowds gathered
Found refuge
In its vastness and sacredness
With candle light and natural light
Grey stone walls were
No more chilling
Natural rays streamed
Through vertical eyes
Shot through its belly
Like those of Irish New grange
And Brought hope to
All those who thread softly
In this spiritual setting
Beneath the earth
With soft noise, serenity
And Tongues of many strangers
Evelyn Casey
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A space that fills the excess, where there is an absence of Place. – Sarah Ward
