On poetry and politics
I don’t know what to say more on the Ukraine war; it has been going on for almost a month.
I did like Bono’s poem about the current war that I have lifted from The Irish Times. In the 1980s, a slightly older acquaintance said he disliked U2 because Bono wrote about things he had no right to (I think he was referring to his song about MLK, Jr.)
But I think Bono’s political views are acute and usually correct. Pop singers/writers don’t have to talk only about romance.
Here is the newspaper excerpt:
Bono’s verse has been met with a wave of sighs, criticism and general bafflement online. Suffice to say, although Pelosi and her colleagues seemed to enjoy the poem, it hasn’t gone down well back in Ireland.
Pelosi read the poem at the annual Friends of Ireland lunch in Washington DC.
Dom Bono, whose real name is Paul David Hewson, which reads like three limericks:
Oh, St Patrick he drove out the snakes
With his prayers but that’s not all it takes
For the snake symbolises
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart, as it breaks
And the evil has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That’s when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again
And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in this human family
Ireland’s sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And St Patrick’s name now Zelenskiy”