The Museum Visitors

by Blue Teapot Performing Arts School & Rab Fulton

In the museum in a ground floor window a cutting of sky,

Pale blue dyed with rain-shone roof tiles as trimming.

There is bird song light and lifting all and any heavy souls,

While almost below hearing the Atlantic murmurs.

 

There is space here; a facsimile of outsideness perhaps, 

Or an auditorium or a stage or a blending of both, 

Like air currents or oceans meeting.

And we the curious group all actors and audience both.

 

We arrive chatting, thinking, laughing, 

Reciting dates and names from Irish history 

And our own his stories and her stories and their stories;

The scholar, the dog walker, the princess, and the talkers, 

The ever romantic, the traveller, 

The quieter ones just taking it all in

In their own unique time and manner.

All a hundred years after the founding events of our nation.

 

We have come to consider those who lived once

And then when their breathing was done 

Where handed on into the safe keeping 

Of the following generations, sovereign and indefeasible.

In January 2023, students from Blue Teapot Performing Arts School joined poet and storyteller Rab Fulton for two Poetry as Commemoration workshops. The group were shown items from the Galway City Museum collection and, as a group, composed a collaborative sequence of poems. Founded in 1996, Blue Teapot is an award winning theatre company that transforms theatre practices by telling stories through the lens of disability. The students from Blue Teapot who took part in this workshop include Damien Quinn, Robert Coomber, Elizabeth Brennan, Catherine Mulkerrin, Francis Carr, Stanlin Joy Hirang, Mary Grace Best-Lydon, Aidan Thomas and Roksana Kazmierska.