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 Nails

I recall some rusty nails, three or four,
in the top right-hand drawer
of an oak desk in my uncle's house.

And that dull pair of shoes he used to wear,
bought for gardening from an Oxfam shop,
their ancient leather hard as bakelite,

that he wore until the soles were gone.
They were also worn by another then long dead
and nameless, save to strangers far away:

for we felt someone there we couldn't see,
that rose from the life the shoes had led
before they came into my uncle's home.

And when he died I found those hand-wrought nails,
all wrapped with muslin, very old,
and wondered what their hidden history was

and what they might have pierced so long ago.
Then I knew someone else was standing near,
out of sight but with a hammer in his hand,

who reached for me from suffering and love
and knew my heart was lamed and broken down,
like some old horse that's never known a shoe.
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's Croft
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa's House
  • 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