Kate Ennals is currently doing the MA in Writing in NUI Galway. She has lived in Ireland (Dublin, Cavan, Galway) for the last 20 years, and worked as a co-ordinator and manager in various anti poverty and community sector programmes.

She has managed a variety of communication networks and enjoys working with local people.

Kate writes poetry and short stories in her spare time.

Picasso’s Eye

We inch along in a crowded crawl

Craning necks inspect pictures on walls

A  thick wavering line with no artist’s perspective

dissolving itself in divided directions

Copious eyes, heads, and arms: a tangled impression

Of the paintings themselves hanging in Tate Britain.

The slow moving cohort of profiled faces

collectively struggle to embrace the senses

To absorb the abstract, make sense of the marks

Understand the title by reconfiguring the art.

A  humane tide in a gallery’s ocean

Composing together a Picasso in motion.

 

In The Hands of  White Men

Their power…

You can feel it in process,

embedded in tracts,

in the bricks and mortar ,

In the stacks of paper,

In the suits and shoes

That  tap out the tune

of the big white men who

prowl,

Behind soft slow smiles,

moulding and shaping ,

manipulating,

working the facts  the way that they are,

have always been.

Gripping and strangulating

Ideas and dreams.

Tall, or fat, skinny, long nosed

The  keepers  of custom

maintain the status quo

with bureaucratic tools

That  inveigle and anoint

Divide and rule,

pick and point

According to scales,

according to whim

According to him.

The regulations they impose

To frame the world

To give them control

Means

The hands of big white men

Embrace us all.