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Liberty Walks Naked
by Maram al-Masri, trans. Theo Dorgan

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Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
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PAUL CASEY

Paul Casey was born in Cork, Ireland in 1968. He is a poet and filmmaker who has lived over half of his life abroad in Europe and Africa, working largely in film, multimedia and teaching. His poems have been published in A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Poetry (Shanghai Literature), Revival, THE SHOp, Cork Literary Review, Census and Doghouse’s Real Beginnings. He is the founder and organiser of the weekly Ó Bhéal poetry event in Cork city where he lives. A chapbook of his longer poems, It’s Not all Bad, was published by The Heaventree Press in May 2009. In June 2010 he completed a poetry-film, The Lammas Hireling, which has been accepted for Berlin’s biennial Zebra International Poetry-Film festival. He is working towards his first collection.

Photo © John Minihan

Bare Feet on Hot Tar

A woman sits under the mukuyu tree
There is a pile of newspaper pages
A Tonga basket of monkey nuts

She has the largest breasts in the world
Mangos, pawpaws, even watermelons
Are nothing compared to these

For only five ngwe she will roll us up
a paper cone, full to the brim
Zikomo Amayi, we say

We jump between shadows of malachite
leaves, copper sun, amethyst sky
Red dust and shells fall behind

Africa is everyone’s mother
Tough as summer soles
Hot and dark as sleep

©2010 Paul Casey

Author Links

Ó Bhéal home page

More about the 2010 Zebra Poetry Film Festival

Purchase The SHOp, Issue 33 containing a Casey poem