Bell

You are invited to the rehearsed reading of

Ob Gob by Roderick Ford,
Directed by Donal Gallagher
Friday, June 21st 2019, 6pm • Free
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork City.

A fictive Europe. An emerging facist state, where the weak and disabled are killed by mobs.

Yulia and her three daughters - Ob Gob, Caoimhe and Neon, have survived by isolating themselves from society, and are bound by a mutual determination to keep the crippled Ob Gob and Caoimhe hidden at all costs. Their situation is about change when Neon gets a chance to leave for college.

Rich with magic realism, gothic theatricality and dry humour, the play presents the women's progress through necromancy and ventroliquism into a sexual and moral decline.

The Old Train

A chain of days puffs from the old smoke stack
of a train that barely makes it up the hill,
and love sits beside me in a third-class seat,
while dreams nod in a corner on their own,
and soul is working somewhere out of sight.
Then I think there's nowhere else I'd rather be,
than on a train that leaves from what I know,
through the undiscovered landscapes of a life,
to that place we all must go to down the line.

As the sun comes tumbling down towards the dark,
the carriages are a flock of golden lights,
and the last points chatter slow as we pull in
to the shadow-casting city in its rose.
The ancient wheels drum-roll us up the platform,
as the old train draws wheezing to a stop
and I hear the engine gasp and then grow quiet.
Then soul steps off to do the thing that souls do,
as we others spot you watching by the gate,
where you've waited all these years to take us home.

List of poems – click / tap to toggle
  • A Plate of Holes
  • Amber
  • An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
  • Auntie
  • Bees
  • Birds of Paradise
  • Bon Voyage
  • Cairo
  • Curve and Swoop
  • Duskfall
  • Fiddler'
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa'
  • Jessica
  • Lay my Corpse
  • Milf
  • Miss Johnson
  • On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out
  • Room of Red
  • Rosa
  • The 16A
  • The Body
  • The Carpenter’s House
  • The Child
  • The Creature by the Sea
  • The Dinner Guest
  • The Fish
  • The Ghisi Miniatures
  • The Gorgon’s Palace
  • The Iron House
  • The Nails
  • The Old Mirror
  • The Old Train
  • The Other Side
  • The Piano Tuner
  • The Shadow Garden
  • The Spinner
  • The Thorn Tree
  • The Uncles