History Lesson
The Stone Age began around 10,000 years before Jesus came
and made the Christians.
There were others too. Gods. Ages. Stones.
In 2010, a man tells me I shouldn’t wear purple tights if
I want to be middle management.
It’s all about impressions and right now you’re giving off a purple
kind of flowery one.
Same with tattoos and piercings. Rotten teeth.
I keep the purple tights on my curved legs. I have no rotten teeth.
He keeps power. Mostly in his pants. He has a mouth of silver fillings.
My mother was born in a three-bedroom terrace in 1955.
She wanted to be the cowboy with a cap gun on the street,
Christmas Day.
She wasn’t mad about the injians.
She never knew her history and it drives her mad.
She’s a furious reader.
Taught me to be a furious reader. Read us endless stories.
Even stories that matched our birth dates.
They were my favourite. Her voice growing tired.
People began to farm and lay down roots and make cheese and
they say the first farm men were very clever men,
knew how to balance staying beside the sea and not getting wet.
My Nana brings digestive biscuits into the
London air raid shelter night after night.
Somewhere near St. Thomas’s she said.
She calls her first son Thomas. My Dad.
He teaches me three things;
always drive into skid marks on an icy road.
He is the most important person in the world.
And when I’m not a cunt, I’m not too bad at all.
Honestly. All things considered.
Nana is glad of the break from slopping out shit buckets
in the hospital.
She’s not a hundred per cent sure who’s dropping bombs
on her,
but she likes the evening company. They sing songs.
She loves to sing.
Her mother died when she was four from a burst appendix.
She’s never been very sure of anything since except how
she loves to sing.
And how very very tall and very handsome her father was.
She liked to drink brandy and smoke the odd cigarette.
I spent one full hour convincing some friends that women
said poems in Ireland before
Eavan Boland. The women friends are suspicious.
They have English degrees.
It’s difficult to remember who first sailed around the
Cape of Good Hope,
or of Storms, Diaz or Da Gama? But man’s stealing stuff
takes a Frankensteinian turn.
Or at least now some ass is keeping a logbook of all the
bastarding things they can do to others.
This would appear to be a good thing.
Silk and spice being basic human needs,
like diamonds and bread and the internet and hoarding.
We can say for sure that Magellan proved the world was round even if;
a woman is laying under a sycamore tree
and watches a dappled grey horse gallop towards her,
steely long legs appear all of a shot, not making sense,
she is a long time pregnant, her nipples thick and dark.
Soon she will give birth, she knows the earth is round
as she sees the horse over her large belly.
It is all too sudden. It must be a ball.
And besides, Magellan died through his experiment.
But this is just a technicality.
She keeps this information to herself.
She doesn’t believe in the many of their any gods.
And besides, she doesn’t want to die for knowing stuff.
Christopher Columbus was a great man.
In the small salmon bedroom of her terrace house,
they put chloroform over my other Nana’s nose on one
of her eleven labours.
This child survives. She’s thankful for not losing another child.
Do your duty. You must do your duty.
It is sometime in the 60s, she’s not too sure. She was
collapsed, she tells me.
Skip through Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, straight to the Jesuits.
We are all Roman Catholic. It says it on the school door.
We’ve cleaned up ‘the abuses’ with PR machines as
immovable as Croagh Patrick. We will ruin you in this town.
Protestantism allowed a randy king marry a younger woman,
stands for nothing but leaving your toaster out on the sink.
There was never really a Civil War in Ireland.
A few brothers had a fight, down in Cork or West Cork,
or actually I think it was Mayo.
Give it five minutes class coverage at most.
Actually I don’t think you need to teach it at all, there’s confession
that day.
Michelangelo, Petrarch, Raphael, Dürer, now they were all great men.
I could go on. And on. And on. And I will.
2015 is the first year I read a comprehensive list of female
Renaissance artists, Sofonisba Anguissola was a friend
of Michelangelo. Bet he copied her.
The Industrial Revolution was a great time, lots of great inventions,
made great by the Agricultural Revolution, lots of food to make
the men great.
Many women worked in the factories,
I don’t know their names.
They only teach about a Spinning Jenny.
And I think this is named after an ass.
In 2007 a doctor tells me I have a brain clot,
I am pregnant, I ask him of the option of a termination.
He tells me that I will change my mind when I am a mother.
‘I am a mother,’ I say.
I heard three women’s names mentioned in my History Class.
Nano Nagle, Constance Markievicz and Mary Robinson.
I try to imagine what they would do.
My first boyfriend punches me seven times on Shop Street
and we end up in the hospital because he puts his fist
through the window of a shop my uncle works in
(bad coincidence). But I am in terror in case anyone
has recognised me. The shame.
In 1927 women are banned from sitting on juries in Ireland.
History lessons. In 1935 contraception is banned in Ireland.
The hospital give me a card for domestic violence abuse victims.
I am embarrassed at how little they know about me.
And how much I can raise a man’s temper.
And my poor ability to mind my men.
I put the card in the bin and withstand another year
for love.
I cannot mind my men. I keep this secret. For now.
I think of Mary Robinson again. I feel a bit of a shit.
It will take a decade before I realise I do not rise temper
in anyone.
They rise all by themselves. This should be the first lesson.
Mussolini’s rise to power was made easy by the colour of their shirts,
the communists,
the Treaty of Versailles and his March on Rome.
I meet Ariana Reines for the first time in 2015. We drink
ginger cocktails in a bar in Copenhagen, I promise I will
use the word cock more in my work.
(cockcockcockcockcock)
I still cannot come up with a proper name for my own
cock area. I like the word cunt, but I like to use it angrily
at those I hate.
(cuntcuntcuntcuntcunt)
I am blown away by Ms. Reines,
and how the paper won’t refuse her ink. I only wish I met
her sooner.
The 1916 Rising was neither a rebellion nor a revolution;
it was a thing apart entirely.
It was a glorious thing, with god and glory and rising.
And look at us all now.
I ask my class why 1916 makes them happy?
They tell me it’s better than being fucking English.
Although a few of them are English, but they like being Irish too.
The men often signed the Solemn League and Covenant in blood.
I correct the use of the word fucking as a race adjective.
I have never taught with an openly gay teacher.
Medieval times meted out some cruel punishments, most of which
are still being perfected and used in the world today.
Though most kids will come away thinking knights are cool
and castles had great shooting windows and the past is the
past and The Enlightenment, oh how enlightened it made us all.
Particularly the men, who in turn could chose what to do with
enlightening the women, and all the other races they had to
deal with too.
Savita Halappanavar dies in October 2012. I cannot stop crying.
2017, My London Bombing Nana is dead and the
Salmon Bedroom Nana is trying hard to remember.
All poems © copyright Elaine Feeney 2017