Fred Johnston was born in Belfast Northern Ireland,.educated there and Toronto, Canada, lived for a time in Spain and Africa and after that in Dublin. Currently he lives in Galway. He is author of a collection of stories from Parthian (Wales) 2011; and ‘Orangeman’, a collection of stories in French, from Terre de Brume (France) 2010. Johnston worked as a fulltime journalist, writer and sub-editor for some years for Irish Press, This Week, Woman’s Choice and Belfast Telegraph (sub-ed.). He edited Westword Magazine, and for a time, and two literary pages in The Galway Advertiser. He received Hennessy Literary Award for prose in 1972, and Sunday Independent Short Story and Poem of the Month awards. He co-founded, The Irish Writers’ Co-operative in the mid-Seventies. Johnston is author of four novels, eight collections of poetry. He was Writer-in- Residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco, 2004.he wrote and broadcast for RTE Radio 1 a four-part series on the literary history of the West of Ireland. He writes on occasion for An Irishman’s Diary, in The Irish Times. Broadcast travel pieces for RTE Radio’s Sunday Miscellany and ‘The Quiet Corner,’for Lyric FM Radio (Ireland), and teaches Creative Writing at NUIG (Adult Education). Fred Johnston is Founder of the Western Writers’ Centre – Ionad Scríbhneoiri Chaitlín Maude – based in Galway (www.twwc.ie). 

 

THREE PAINTINGS BY IRISH ARTISTS BY FRED JOHNSTON

 

SECRET POOLS

(painting by Fergus Lyons)

I am a figure in a landscape
A drip of blue from a scarcely necessary sky
Visible only to the stripped-naked eye –

Rocks tumbled and missed me by a hair
I was here and there amongst them like rain
I bend as if to bear their weight again –

Take me home if you can find me
Or when a tide comes in that’s a step too fast
Tell them I was scooping up handfuls of sea

I took my time and didn’t look behind
To any path or clamber-way: I was occupied
With what the water hid, and what I could find.

 

STILL LIFE IN PURPLE

(painting by Patrick Hickey)

The table was laid when we got there
We ate with our fingers
Everything was bone-dry and tasted
Of the dryness of itself,
But we’d come a long way.

A black bowl might have been a skull-
Top, it was as empty
As exhausted thought
There was a haste in the cloth
That flagged we weren’t the first.

There’d been others holding down
The inedible emptiness
Colouring with their going
The lip of the jug, the yellow
Of phlegm on a bruise of purple.

They had taken the knives, forks,
The spoon that had emptied
The skull-bowl
And managed to leave just
A feather of blood on the rim of the plate.

 

THE LAST TO FLY

(painting by Graham Knuttel)

The moon fell on me like a blade
The birds buggered off
There was nothing to defend but the drop
To the wriggly sea
But no orders came, I remained where I was
Directing thin air, obeying orders.

That’s what you do, so never volunteer:
Less a hero, more a
Seaside goon gone blind from seeing nothing
With the sea
See-sawing like a reluctant invitation
And the enemy neither here nor there.

I had a uniform once that said who I was
Or at least made a shape at it –
I’m disguised adequately
Enough as a child’s
Toy on a horizon drawn by idiots
For whom the absurd is the buck-naked truth.