Not of the light luminescence of spring, but a darker green now.
When the richer greens are more complicated, and more mature, and heavier.
When the green of the grass is fuller then, than the younger grass, only then are the ants ready to fly.
One evening in July, between the dusk and sunset, when the temperature, light and humidity are just right, and when the grass is long enough and strong enough, to launch them.
Then and only then, can the ants file one by one, and fly into the sky.
Straight up, and into the wild awaiting air for them.
Their first flight with their new, tiny, translucent wings takes their weight and the wind, and takes them high, into the blue sky still. The clouds wait, and the air supports them.
Off they fly, into today and into the summer eve’s blue. And it will be the blue that’s a part of it. When the sky is Maya blue, or cornflower blue, or wait, of course…cerulean.
Some ants are brave and Gung ho. They fly off on the adventure with big, lascivious grins. They can’t wait to mate, and start new colonies wherever they land, far away from the backyards where they started from.
Other ants have summer melancholia and are wistful for their old homes, which were familiar and safe. They feel vertiginous, and nauseous, and teary. They will never enjoy the evening acrobatics, or the free falling or the dangers. They look backwards, towards the homes where they once belonged.
Some ants are neutral: neither excited nor dreading the event. They simply accept it’s what they do, on this one night in July, alongside all the other ants.
All the thoughts and doubts. The awe ants, and doubting ants, sad ants and excited ants, joyful ants and naughty ants, funny ants and deeply, earnest ants.
All flying in the sky, spectacularly.
All the other ants, know the moment of flight from the temperature, the light, the humidity and the way the green grass looks different now, from the luminescence of the spring. But now a darker green, a more mature green and a more complicated colour.
This tremendous journey under azure skies, timelessly.
A few years ago, when I first noticed younger people offering me their seats on public transport, I would shake my head and hands furiously and say, “no thank you”. Lately, when offered a seat, I smile sweetly and take it immediately. I don’t care if there are more deserving people on the bus. I barge past them and sit on the throne offered. Then like everyone else on the bus, I open my phone and inhale its content, slack jawed and vacant eye’d.
People on the buses are fascinating.
My favourite seat is the one at the front, on the upper deck. I love the views and there’s extra space for my bags, and there’s an unwritten rule that you’re not here to chat or make friends, but simply to enjoy the ride.
I try to avoid the back seat on the upper desk, as that’s where all the mischief makers head. The back seat on the upper deck, is where groups of unruly youths go to vape and play their music loudly, and cause trouble. They’ll scream and laugh and be a nuisance.
The downstairs back seat row is more subdued. This is a cave of safety where the serious gather. It’s here you’ll see people reading books or listening to self-help podcasts. The downstairs front area, meanwhile, is an eclectic mix of older people, tourists and drug users.
The tourists can be further divided into those wearing decent rain gear and those who don’t know where they are, or where they’re going. Some of them put their suitcases in the carriage near the driver and then regret this decision bitterly. They ask everyone, many times, where O’Connell Street is, and they look both scared and disappointed. They seem aghast at the weather, prices and lack of glamour, and they seem so wildly unimpressed, you wonder what they’d hoped for.
Dublin bus drivers are the most patient drivers in the whole world.
They are tourist guides, agony aunts, mediators, healers and they bestow sacred rites. I love to hear their responses to some questions, including “do you accept dollars,” “is this the way to Belfast” and “do you know my cousin John?” I love watching two bus drivers stop their vehicles on opposite sides of the street, just to say hello, or, how’s it going? I always say, “good morning” and “thank you” to the drivers, and sometimes I wave when I leave.
Nowadays, people enjoy having full blown conversations on their mobiles, on the buses, and they don’t mind who listens in. Sometimes the conversations are incredibly personal or scrappy or illegal. Sometimes, more than one person is on the phone, almost screaming down the line: and like a bar after 8.00pm the noise gets exponentially higher and higher.
Eventually, one of them yells, “I’ll call you back later, I can’t hear myself think on this bus”.
When did we, as a species, learn not to be alone with our thoughts for more than 17 seconds at a time?
I feel like it happened lately, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Like children in the nursery, we need the constant reassurance, company, approval and entertainment of the ever-fixed blue light, and that sense of comfort that scrolling gives to us. Rock us silently to sleep, friendly phone, remove our discomfort, boredom and stress, help us manage the pain.
Beep, beep, ping, ping.
A place for all the thoughts of all the people, all the time. A magic hat of all the feelings and all the facts and all the fights. A goldfish bowl of stale cold water, with bits of rotten dead fish fins in them.
A mirror, a window, a light, an overfilled bin.
In time, the daisies in the garden are not entitled.
They stand, in these weeks protecting those we can’t see, from the wind and rain. Their petals so soft to the touch. They remind you of a satin edged blanket, that comforted your chin, in your childhood bed. Or the forehead of a puppy from a farm, you can’t remember the name of just now. But strangely, the sounds from the horseshoes in the stable, has come to you.
Hay smells of summertime.
And when you wake and sleep at light time, while other street noises continue, you have the sense of being watched over.
Minded by the daisies.
The bicycle wheel white petals are also Flamenco dancers, in part, with wild arms flaying to music. Or sleeves on silk dresses. Their tiny yellow heads, move, and like lighthouses for the snails and slugs, or umbrellas for the hotter days.
Exhausted from their journeys through the dark earth and clay, until finally they sing, “hello, we are here”.
Unordered, delightful daisies, swaying in the back yard for us and for them.
You can’t have a country as green as ours without the falling water.
You hear the rain splashing down on asphalt, on the windowpanes of the houses and buses. It’s part of the soundscape and a background track for this city.
Some weeks ago, the sound of the city was the shouts and chants of people demanding that migrants like me, go home! The protesters carried banners of anti-migrant poster boys, like the Presidents of the United States and Russia and an Irish marital artist, recently found guilty of rape.
Some of the protesters carried crosses, even though St Patrick himself was a migrant. As was Jesus.
Some of the protesters wish to go back to a time, before the migrants came to this rock on the edge of the Atlantic. They long for the 1980s, which was a decade of famous tranquillity, fairness, equity and justice. They believe there were no house shortages or unemployment in the 1980s. Their memories state that Ireland was a heavenly garden of Eden, with no addiction issues or poverty, in that special decade.
Some of the protesters wish to go back further.
They liked it better when nice, white, Irish women and nice, white, teenage girls could have nice, white, babies with Irish men. No abortions, no trans rights, no mixed-race children!
I’m not going to listen to their sounds anymore.
I’m not going to listen, anymore, to such words of people, who tell me that their Aunt Mary-Kate went on the anti-migrant march but isn’t anti-migrant.
Aunt Mary-Kate can go and fuck herself!
I can’t be arsed making excuses for Aunt Mary-Kate anymore.
When did it become my job to explain to Aunt Mary-Kate that the engine room of this republic is staffed by migrant workers? Without us you can close the creches and the cafes and the care homes. Don’t try and use public transport or taxis without the migrant workforce. Good luck getting your takeaway prepared, cooked and delivered to your home, and don’t be surprised when hospitals can’t function, without migrants like me.
It’s not my role, to highlight the irony to Aunt Mary-Kate, of this country’s history of migration. Will she bring new posters to the next march, that say, “Stop the Norman Invasion!”, “Vikings Go Home!”, “Irish Diaspora Return – NOW!”
And where does she want us to go, this Aunt Mary-Kate?
We can’t go home, when we are home.
I became Irish seven years ago and in my citizenship ceremony, retired Supreme Judge Brian McMahon, told us that we were as Irish as anyone born here.
But you can’t say this to Aunt Mary-Kate, who thinks that facts are fake news, and that discourse and debate are methods to silence her right to free speech. You can’t use reason and rationale with someone who puts their fingers in their ears and shouts back, “this new way isn’t fair!”
The sound of Dublin is rain, and laughter and stories, within the craic agus ceol. But the sound from O’Connell Street, that day frightened me. They hate me because of the accident of my birth, not because of my own hatbox of contradictions and sins, but they pre-judge me because of where my parents had unprotected sex.
It chills, me, this sound of people who hate me. The sound is so menacing and so large. And so I become quieter.
We’re an orchestra of correlated mammals in a unified living system, and so with a deep breath, love and wide-open kindness, I come back to Aunt Mary-Kate and I try to explain again.
Perhaps this time I whisper.
Our synchronised sounds can be beautiful flute music, or hellish discord.
Even the older trees have memories and want to live well.
The robins bathe, at sundown so that their feathers can make the flight, and we are alive now.
The staggering pain of this life is only balanced by its incomparable beauty and joy. The open secret, if there is one, is to experience both.
Shorter than me 