E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Montreal - with its lively Irish-Quebec traditions - always had huge St Patrick's Day parades. My parents would take me as a kid, and I recall the many red-faced men waving from their rather ordinary flat-bed trucks, touched with a strand of green something. The highlight for me was always the horses, and the horse-s--t, and the musical marchers stepping with the luck of the Irish down the littered streets. It was usually bitterly cold - sometimes zero or below. After the parade my mother would want an Irish coffee, and we'd go and have something green to drink - as I got older, coloured beer. My father, Irish-Canadian (his Mom from Belfast) would sing us Bing Crosby songs from the album Shamrocks and Shillelaghs . Who threw the overalls in Mrs Murphy's chowder... Winter was breaking, the town was festive, - it always seemed like a good omen for the rest of the year. As I got older, Winter Carnival debates would sometimes fall around that time. Debaters from across ...

My very first featured poet at Eyewear was the Irish poet and critic Kevin Higgins , who was then about to marry poet and writer Susan Millar DuMars . This poem is from Kevin's debut collection, The Boy With No Face , from Salmon. The poem was written for Susan. Both of them have new collections out this spring 2010 - they'll be reviewed here in the goodness of time. Meanwhile, it seems like a good idea to welcome St. Patricks Day with a poem by Higgins. The requiem plays, though not for us Let’s never gaze at each other across an unbridgeable space, (even through cold panes of glass may our fingers reach and touch) nor battle, separated, through the mobs of shoppers and the caustic weather of a raw November thoroughfare. May the music we make be a Spanish guitar, let no disconsolate adagio be any creation of ours and if, of an evening, you happen to catch me listening to Mozart’s requiem, it won’t be our union that sombre music will be mourning. poem by Kevin Higgins