Cassandra Voices

Tag: year

  • Podcast: ‘Turkey’s Phrase of the Year: Gözaltina aliniyorum’

     

    The Turkish phrase Gözaltına alınıyorum translates simply as: ‘I’m being taken into custody.’ This was selected by the independent media outlet T24 as the phrase of the year for 2025. Had it not been that, in my view, it just as easily could have been Türkiye’de yargı bağımsızdır, meaning ‘the judiciary in Turkey is independent,’ a line repeated endlessly, like a tongue-twister, by Ministers and MPs from Erdoğan’s ruling party, the AKP. And yes, I’m being ironic.

    On March 19, Turkey woke up to a morning marked by an operation aimed at eliminating the possibility of a change in power through elections, and declaring open war on institutional opposition.

    The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and the opposition’s presidential hopeful, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken into custody along with dozens of IMM employees and close members of his team. Shortly afterward, university students organized and gathered in front of Istanbul University main campus, marching toward Saraçhane, which is the location of the Istanbul mayoral headquarters, just a couple of kilometers away.

    Then more people joined. And more.

    Emergency bans on unauthorized demonstrations and marches were imposed at lightning speed. Metro and bus services were cancelled by government decree to block access to the area. The police presence and traffic checkpoints increased rapidly. Even these hastily implemented measures – designed specifically to prevent people from gathering in front of the IMM headquarters – failed to stop hundreds of thousands from filling the streets within hours.

    In the days that followed, people maintained a vigil through the nights, both at Çağlayan Courthouse, where Mayor İmamoğlu was taken, and in front of the municipality building. They refused to leave the Squares.

    While all this was unfolding, people like me – those watching from afar living abroad – fell into a grimly familiar ritual. Every morning around 6am, opening X (Twiiter) meant watching your entire timeline fill, within seconds, with posts like:

    “I’m being taken into custody.”

    “Police raided my home at dawn. I’m being taken into custody.”

    “The police came to my apartment in Şişli around 4:30 a.m. Please take care of my dog. I think I’m being taken into custody.”

    There were dozens of such tweets. Some days, without exaggeration, hundreds.

    Turkey Isn’t Outside the West. It Helped Build It

    Fast forward to today. Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with over 400 others, has been held in pretrial detention for nine months. Those detained include sixteen mayors from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP); his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan; his election campaign adviser, Necati Özkan; his drivers, Recep Cebeci and Zekai Kıratlı (whose names do not even appear in the 4,000-page indictment); his assistant, Kadriye Kasapoğlu; district mayor Murat Çalık, a two-time cancer survivor currently undergoing treatment; and hundreds of others I cannot possibly list here.

    As I write these lines, social media is once again flooded with news of fresh crackdowns targeting the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. The municipality’s deputy secretary general, the head of the fire department, Remzi Albayrak, and dozens of others have been taken into custody as part of the ongoing operations against İmamoğlu and his circle.

    All of these individuals are accused of forming a criminal organization, corruption, causing public financial loss, and terrorism – charges that, over time, have increasingly been reframed as espionage, alongside several other alleged crimes.

    According to legal professionals and academics, these accusations are laid out in an indictment of roughly 4,000 pages that does not read as if it were prepared with professional rigour. The document has been widely criticized for being grossly inflated, riddled with technical errors, filled with repetitive sections, reliant almost exclusively on anonymous “secret witness” testimony, and strikingly devoid of concrete or substantiated evidence. More troubling still, some of the more than 400 people currently in detention are not even named in the indictment, yet they remain behind bars.

    Very recently, the European Court of Human Rights decided to fast-track Ekrem İmamoğlu’s case, specifically his application concerning unlawful detention. The application was filed by his lawyer, Mehmet Pehlivan who is himself currently in detention.

    Yet the European Court of Human Rights, along with international institutions more broadly, is increasingly portrayed by the Erdoğan government, now in its twenty-third year in power, as anti-national, foreign-backed, and unpatriotic. In official rhetoric, these institutions are cast as insufficiently “domestic” and allegedly hostile to Turkey’s national interests.

    This framing follows a familiar authoritarian script, but reality is more complicated, and far less convenient. Turkey is not an outsider to the Western political and legal order. It helped build it.

    Turkey is a founding signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and a member of the Council of Europe, making it legally bound by both the Convention’s provisions and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is also a party to the core United Nations human rights treaties.

    What, then, is the purpose of this fabricated, anti-Western, exclusionary narrative?

    ‘Down With Tyranny, Long Live Freedom!’

    The aim is to crush resistance, normalize sweeping losses of rights, freedoms, and prosperity, and impose a “new Turkey” modelled on a hybrid of Central Asian authoritarianism, Russian-style rule, and the institutional failures of parts of the post-colonial Middle East.

    This vision is fundamentally incompatible with Turkey’s realities: its diverse socio-cultural fabric and, more importantly, its socio-political legacy of more than two centuries of struggle for democracy and modernization.

    That legacy dates back to 1839, a decisive turning point in Ottoman history, when decades-long, Western-oriented reform efforts were institutionalized through the Tanzimat Edict. These reforms eventually led to the establishment of the first parliament and the first civilian constitution in 1876.

    With the Tanzimat Edict, Ottoman subjects were recognized as equal citizens for the first time. Egalitarian reforms in areas such as taxation and military service aimed to ensure that non-Muslims, alongside Turkish Muslim citizens, bore the same duties and responsibilities toward the state.

    The reforms also sought to guarantee the security of life, property, and honour for all citizens; to ensure property could be lawfully inherited; to establish transparency in judicial proceedings; and to prohibit executions without due process.

    These principles were not merely rhetorical. Concrete regulations gave them legal force, and the constitution that followed formally limited and distributed the powers of the sultan.

    In 1858, homosexuality was decriminalized, making the Ottoman Empire the second state in the world, after France in 1791, to take such a remarkable step.

    The path toward building a republic grounded in parliamentary democracy and equal citizenship, however, was never linear. As in France, Italy, or Japan, and many other democracies, progress came through reversals and ruptures. The Ottoman Empire’s first constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved, only to be reinstated three decades later. As borders across Europe were redrawn through wars and upheaval, this turbulent process culminated in the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

    Like other nations, Turks did not abandon the desire for a better future or the struggle required to build it. Today, however, all of this is under threat.

    President Erdoğan has amassed more power than many Ottoman sultans and continues to seek more. Research by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg shows that Turkey’s democracy score stood at 0.17 in the early 1900s, rose to 0.53 in the early years of the republic, reached 0.74 in 2002 when Erdoğan’s AKP first came to power, and has since fallen back to 0.18.

    It is no coincidence that a slogan more than a century old has returned to the streets: Kahrolsun istibdat, yaşasın hürriyet! meaning  ‘Down with tyranny, long live freedom.’ It has been one of the most frequently chanted slogans at the Saraçhane demonstrations following İmamoğlu’s imprisonment.

    For more than two decades, Turkey’s media has been monopolized by oligarchs handpicked by Erdoğan. As a result, the voices of ordinary, hardworking, middle class Turks have been largely silenced, especially abroad. Deliberate policies have severed society’s connection with the outside world, suppressed public expression, and helped cement an image of Turkey as a failed democracy which is a perception many in the West has accepted uncritically.

    The Syrian war, and the years-long influx of refugees have reinforced this distorted view. Since 2012, Turkey has become nearly inseparable from Syria in the Western imagination, as if the country had absorbed another nation entirely. Over more than a decade, this association has come at steep economic, political, and moral costs, leaving Turkey and Syria almost interchangeable in the minds of outsiders.

    It is precisely these deliberately erased realities of Turkey that I want to bring back into focus in this article.

    Through its constitution, Turkey is a parliamentary democracy, and until roughly a decade ago, it functioned as one, at least since 1950, around the same time many Western democracies were consolidating. Eastern Europe, by contrast, remained under authoritarian rule until the 1990s. Since 2017, however, Turkey has gradually morphed into an electoral autocracy, with steadily eroding rights and freedoms.

    Yet Turkish society itself is not defined by these trends. Erdoğan is attempting to impose a regime change against the will of the people.

    Even before the unlawful detention of İmamoğlu and hundreds of others, a 2024 PEW Research survey showed that 67 percent of Turks were dissatisfied with the country’s democracy. Among those under 35, that figure rises to 75 percent. Eighty percent of respondents support direct, electoral democracy, while 62 percent reject the idea of indefinite rule by a strongman.

    In another striking example, 56 percent of people in Turkey believe that religious texts – given the country’s Muslim-majority population, in this case the Quran – should have no influence over the constitution or laws. This figure is several times higher than in other Muslim-majority countries, where comparable research could be conducted.

    For context, the same survey analyzed thirty-six countries, including Tunisia, which experienced a brief period of parliamentary democracy between 2011 and 2021 and today scores slightly higher than Turkey on democracy indices. Yet Tunisia is excluded from the section of the study that examines the role of the Quran in politics simply because even asking such questions is socially unacceptable there, despite Tunisia being one of the West’s preferred points of comparison with Turkey. By comparison, the equivalent figures are 51 percent in the United States, 57 percent in Poland (referring to the Bible), 54 percent in Israel (Jewish scripture), and just 12 percent in India (Hindu scripture).

    Only 17 percent of people in Turkey believe religious texts should influence national laws. By contrast, the figure is 66 percent in Indonesia (home to Bali, often perceived as a globally famous, relatively secular tourist destination), 22 percent in our complex, love-hate neighbor Greece, and 28 percent in the United States.

    Why does this matter?

    The overwhelming majority of Turks, regardless of religiosity or whether they vote for Erdoğan and the AKP, support Turkey’s constitutional definition as a secular, parliamentary, democratic republic. They want these founding principles to remain intact, and they are deeply dissatisfied with the current system of governance.

    A new constitutional amendment is expected soon. Just as previous amendments were justified with buzzwords like “military oversight,” “judiciary status quo,” or “democratization,” the government is likely to use the cultural rights demands of Turkey’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds, as a pretext for a full constitutional overhaul. In reality, these issues could be addressed through minor, targeted adjustments without rewriting the constitution.

    In the near future, many will try to tell you otherwise. Please, don’t believe them.

  • Poem: ‘The Longest Day of the Year’

    THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

    Lucky gull chicks on a city roof
    take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth;
    for them, life has begun as well as it could.
    The flightless chick who fell from its nest above
    and is abandoned by its parents
    on a hostile gull family’s roof
    is shut in a large, bright, open room
    and soon learns that fear is a nail
    that fixes the whole being to a hard board.

    The lost chick can hear its family above
    and calls to them, looking up to a place
    it cannot reach and from which no helps comes;
    flight is weeks away. The enemy adults attack
    and the refugee huddles in a corner
    watching the privileged chicks eat well,
    all because the spots on its head
    are not in the correct pattern.
    Sometimes it cannot resist any longer
    and rushes forward to try and share the food,
    but is driven back by sharp, flashing beaks.

    The fallen one must somehow hang on,
    surviving on forgotten scraps
    until its feathers are ready
    and a new phase of life begins.
    The prisoner walks around and around,
    the will to live fighting the hunger,
    but it cannot escape for now, no matter what.
    Living in terror in this rooftop hell,
    every day is the longest day of the year.

    Feature Image: Magda Ehlers

     

  • Poem: ‘Year of The’ by Haley Hodges

    Year of The

    Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
    twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
    backward into my mouth and forward only
    when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
    year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
    neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
    our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
    year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
    literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
    year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
    guided identification of desires, year of my father
    unable to discuss that which is not the village
    council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
    child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
    of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
    turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
    everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
    year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
    madness, year of attending to various screens, year
    of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
    of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
    pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
    year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
    of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
    year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
    at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
    the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
    pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
    out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
    ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
    again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
    on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
    one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
    the year of being trapped in a word document
    the year of being trapped in a word


    Feature Image: Vlada Karipovich

  • Bliain an Áir – ‘The year of slaughter’ 1740-41

    Bliain an Áir
    ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41

    Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs
    was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash
    descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world
    began to shift – a tiny alteration
    sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese
    no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river
    waters died. An iron frost persisted, all the spring,
    without a rain, the blooming yearly crop undone –
    in every rill and valley, sick. The factious common people
    roared in protestation; then dwindled down, masticating
    slowly, like a herd, on sour, curdled soup and sallow greens:
    a meal of nettle stems and charlock – the lush,
    green-leafed, light-golden-flowered thing that grows
    among the grass. The lark-lit summer moors
    were blank; the meadow-birds aghast. No longer
    having feed to give, the grieving poor death-rattled
    in the fields, as the little cows they tended fell.
    Like rotten sheep themselves, after supping
    dead potatoes in distress, whole parishes surrendered,
    passing out, in fever-thin delirium, to waste
    and bloody flux: a plague of desperation, day by day.
    Town and city quickly filled with remnants of the living.
    The census-takers floundered; swelling ditches overflowed.
    To put an end to expiration, the famous bishop
    brewed a broth: a medicine made up of milk
    and boiling water, with a sprinkling of chalk –
    to be dispensed among the stricken, till the ague settled down.
    Feature Image: gravestone in Coolaghmore, county Kilkenny of the Lee family, of whom three members died in 1741–42.

  • Unforgettable Year: April 2020

    April is generally associated with fresh flowers and cooling rain showers. It is also the dreaded deadline to file taxes. Whether you were enjoying the foliage or sitting down to calculate your tax refund, I think we can all agree that April was particularly cruel this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    That month Frank Armstrong examined the underlying conditions exacerbating the pandemic in most Western countries:

    The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.

    As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.

    NGO worker Justin Frewen drew on his experience of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea. He recognised that ‘the potential onward transmission of Covid-19 is far greater than for Ebola, as it does not require direct physical contact with the carrier of the virus.’ By that stage, however, it seems it could not ‘be transmitted through the air directly which would greatly increase its range and ease of transmission.’

    Frewen also recalled the failures of the WHO during the Ebola epidemic, and speculated as to whether the organisation had been too slow, again, in controlling the outbreak.

    Meanwhile a pandemic doctor was steeling himself to the arrival of the grim reaper:

    By recognising what death is we recognise what life is. That is maybe why this feels like such a moment of quickening. Death has come knocking at our doors and we are forced to open and acknowledge him. The door will close again, but the collective memory will remain, and when the pandemic is over this may help us to invest life with more meaning.

    Another pandemic doctor surveyed the chaos in Ireland’s care homes, in an article that was subsequently republished on the state broadcaster RTÉ’s website:

    Last I saw her, rendered unrecognisable behind sheets of dehumanising plastic, she clutched at my hand with her failing limbs and begged me not to leave. But in every room, each now unadorned with the usual ersatz trappings of home and identity one finds in nursing homes – photographs, homespun blankets, love letters from grandchildren – fellow residents lie awaiting their rushed assessments. Oxygen saturations, pulse and respiratory rate, a survey of existing co-morbidities, and finally resuscitation and transfer status to be revisited and revised: who might possibly be saved by hospital transfer, and whose last comfort would be the inevitable cocktail of morphine and midazolam, slipped quietly under the skin at intervals until death arrives.

    The pandemic created an enormous burden on the finances of most European States. By April according to Kyran FitzGerald the E.U. was teetering on the brink:

    Across Europe, national Governments have moved to tackle the crisis by propping up incomes. Northern European states tend to have efficient bureaucracies and reasonable resilient national balance sheets. But even in places such as prosperous Denmark, there are concerns that many businesses will not reopen after what is increasingly looking like a long shut down.

    The picture in Southern Europe is as mentioned much more bleak. In Italy and Spain, there is a real sense of let down amid the crisis, though better off nations like Germany have latterly moved to show solidarity by sending supplies and flying some patients from Eastern France and northern Italy to their hospitals for treatment.

    Lockdowns…

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    The lockdown will live long in cultural imaginations, and as an instrument of government control; its pros and cons will be debated endlessly. We published an account from China, where the policy first emerged by an anonymous correspondent, who saw it as the beginning of another Cultural Revolution.

    I had booked a hotel – but ended up alongside five families living in a large apartment for seven days. Only two of us were allowed outside to buy food – everyone else had to stay inside. Before leaving we were covered head-to-toe, in gloves, face masks and head coverings. On our return we went through elaborate cleaning procedures before re-entering the apartment. We had to remove our ‘outside’ clothing and spray everything with 75% alcohol.

    No cars with registrations from outside the capital city were allowed in. The schools were on holiday and due to return the first week in March but are still closed all over China. Only students doing important exams at the end of term will be allowed to return initially, which hasn’t happened yet.

    Leaving Beijing, I returned to my home city of ****. You are supposed to scan your phone so they can track potential carriers arriving into the city – which I hadn’t, having used a private firm for the airport collection. This meant my car registration didn’t show up on the cameras. So the next day the authorities were in touch to find out how I made it back from the airport.

    Italy was the first European country to adopt the measure, and from Piedmont Silvia Panizza observed how the confinement was diminishing her physical health:

    Our bodies, already weakened by sedentary lifestyles, are becoming weaker, muscle-mass decreasing quickly through lack of exercise. We do what we can, setting up home gyms, doing yoga in our bedrooms, a few push ups in the morning. No running, swimming, no going for walks; hardly breathing in the fresh air, panting, moving, or sweating. I do a little gardening in pots on the balcony, which I hadn’t done before. All of a sudden tomato seeds seemed the most important item on my shopping list during my weekly, stressful visit to the supermarket.

    It was a particularly challenging period for older people who were advised to cocoon in Ireland, another unwelcome neologism from this period. Fergus Armstrong reflected on the experience:

    We can have a gnawing sense that our civilisation got things wrong, that it is being, somehow, punished. A year ago I heard a retreat-giver say that we had lost the ability to read the signs of the times. We had belonged, or thought we belonged, on a planet that although under threat, and although subject to disaster more or less randomly distributed, was broadly on a path of progress, of improvement, even for under-developed regions. Nature mostly provided balance and harmony.

    Modern science reinforces this optimism at the cosmic level. We now know that the total universe that includes our Milky Way as one of nearly a hundred million galaxies has been expanding since the Big Bang. But if the rate of its expansion had been even a millionth of a percent slower, the whole thing would have collapsed, imploded in upon itself. There was fine tuning. Now trust is at issue with a particularly severe jolt for the Western world. It could be said that most of our strategies of coping are in the nature of distraction. To the extent this is so, the underlying unease remains. Call it dis-ease in fact.

    While over in Porto, Brazilian Fellipe Monteiro observed:

    What I, other immigrants, and the Portuguese hope is that we can return to the life we had before, and be able to leave this prison, without bars, that our homes have become. While we try to renew ourselves, the city is still and visibly lacking the energy and joy of the local population.

    What is most intriguing in this situation, at least for me, is that we are trying to reinvent ourselves. For example, I have started to cook a lot more during these days of confinement, learning new recipes, in addition to adapting the house for new activities we never used to do at home, like dancing and exercising.

    Despite everything I believe that together we will overcome this difficulty, which is happening on a a global scale; staying at home admiring the birds and their songs that echo along with an inaudible cry for freedom from the citizens.

    In Sweden, however, a softer approach was being taken to the pandemic, the merits of which, or otherwise, are also still being fiercely debated. A correspondent based there revealed the philosophy underpinning the policy:

    The Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic is a sign of underlying differences in how they understand morality in the public sphere, and how they relate with each other: this comes from a more utilitarian perspective.

    Utilitarianism has earned a bad reputations as it has been incorrectly conflated with crude capitalism, when it is really about taking peoples’ wellbeing seriously, or ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ As Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mills understood it, utilitarianism is extremely equalitarian .

    Notably, the Swedish government has taken the advice of moral philosophers who come from a moral utilitarian perspective. The core difference between their approach and what we are seeing for the most part elsewhere is they attempt to avoid an understandable reaction to save lives immediately. They put aside an emotional response and consider the future consequences.

    Also, across the water in the United States, Bull Moose was typically bullish about opening up, in a dispatch from Atlanta:

    What the hell? Most people in the U.S. appear to be freaking out about Georgia ending its lockdown before anyone else. Even Trump weighed in, saying he disagreed with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. As we stand, restaurants here opened yesterday, as have bowling alleys, parks, nail salons and other facilities. The State also just declared its one thousandth death from COVID-19.

    On April 2nd Kemp admitted that he didn’t know that this coronavirus could spread asymptomatically, something the world knew since late January. Kemp may be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong to re-open Georgia’s economy. With all respect to those who have lost loved ones or suffered from a bout, it’s time collectively we get back to our new normality.

    Earth Day

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    April 22nd marked the fiftieth anniversary or Earth Day, and leading environmental writer John Gibbons recalled how this had been closely followed by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon in 1972, along with a host of other key environmental protection legislation, writing:

    Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.

    Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.

    The Public Intellectual Series continued with assessment by David Langwallner of John Gray, the U.K.’s leading intellectual, and Jonathan Sumption the former U.K. Supreme Court judge who became an outspoken critic of lockdowns, and a defender of civil liberties first formulated in England in the Magna Carta (pictured above).

    Meanwhile Musician of the Month Niwel Tsumbu asserted the universality of music:

    It is very strange for me to hear people talk about pure ‘African Music’ that doesn’t exist – unless you go back thousands of years before humans started roaming around the globe. This concept is simply not true, and frankly, it drives me crazy when people, especially African musicians who use equal-tempered tuning with Western instruments, say so.

    We also published the lyrics of the song ‘Iguatu’ by Bartholomew Ryan:

    I sauntered up to the sertão
    in the northeast to a town called Iguatu
    to find the river
    where my cousin drowned in 1973
    the name of the river was the Jaguaribe
    they called it the dry river
    but as his sister Joan said –
    ‘there was nothing dry about it that day.’

    One surprisingly popular article explored how the Longford town of Ballinallee featured in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Contain Multitudes,’ with a suggestion that it may have come about after a night Dylan spent in the company of fellow bard Shane MacGowan.

    Today and tomorrow and yesterday, too,
    The flowers are dyin’ like all things do,
    Follow me close, I’m going to Ballinalee,
    I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me.

    Uluc Ali Kilic in his studio in Istanbul. Daniele Idini

    Artist of the month was the extraordinary Uluc Ali Kilic from Turkey:

    My subject-matter is often the harm and destruction humanity inflicts on its surroundings, or other traumatic issues occurring in our time, such as the refugee crisis and homelessness. I try to make long-lasting artworks using plastic material which isn’t biodegradable in nature. Likewise, these artworks aim to last long in any viewers’ consciousness.

    In fiction there was the unmistakable style of Ilsa Monique Carter in Dumaine:

    Glacial and dark by design, her house inhaled the heat if by the gliding open of a sliding glass door, its hermetic seal was compromised. And like a large lung, the house then exhaled a quixotic draft of cooler air, which carried me with it out on to the balcony. Before she’d bolted the door behind me, no matter how briskly, and believe me she was… The sweet swelter had swallowed me whole.

    While Gary Grace brought us to the chaotic streets of Dublin to life after a night out in ‘A Slice’:

    Robbie was in what his friends referred to as “swaying tree mode”. This meant the slender greying hipster was pissed, his eyes barely open, and not engaging with anyone but moving slowly side to side, mouthing the lyrics to a song that wasn’t playing.

    There was poetry in English and his native Romanian from Radu Vancu.

    As well as a series of poems to mark Holy Week, including:

    A Corona Sonnet
    by Paul Curran

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,
    All faces one mask of consternation,
    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,
    This virus respects no race or nation.
    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber
    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,
    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,
    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.
    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,
    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;
    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,
    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.
    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick
    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick.

    And another from Billy O Hanluain:

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Unforgettable Year: January 2020

    Unforgettable Year: February 2020

    Unforgettable Year: March 2020