Let’s celebrate the life because this is the great thing we have

Patti Smith tells to us from the stage of Galway International Arts Festival.

Her words are like a pat on the shoulder in everyday life. Just an hour ago, I was gathering the strength to stand here. And now I feel light, with joy shimmering in my heart. Not only mine, but also the hearts of those around me. The poet we’ve been waiting for plays these notes and words intently on her guitar:

Oh-

To be

Not anyone

Gone

This maze of being

Skin

Oh–

To cry

Not any cry

So mournful that

I sway to “Beneath the Southern Cross” and grow into the grass where I stand in the orange light, in orange pants.

Patti Smith is relaxed and charming as always. In baggy jeans and a white T-shirt, she admits to wearing sloppiny in Galway. This incredible woman on stage seems as if she’s sitting at the same table with us in a pub.

Yet she’s also incisive, punk rock. She is swearing, and even spitting. And as she runs across the stage and energetically grabs the microphone, her beautiful silver hair rises like waves of the churning Atlantic, then dances under the lights. Because Patti fucking Smith is unwaveringly herself.

When she recites Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl,” another great poet of the American counterculture, she becomes a priestess. Then she crumples the poem and throws it at the audience. Because Patti Smith presents us with poetry as something we can’t live without.

And especially for Galway, she reads W.B. Yeats’s “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.”

Dance there upon the shore

What need have you to care

For wind or water’s roar?

And tumble out your hair

(…)

What need have you to dread

The monstrous crying of wind!

I am happy we can be together here in this troubled world!

Smith, always socially engaged, repeatedly emphasizes during the concert that each of us has an undeniable right to be free. She concludes by singing “Peaceable Kingdom” a song written for Palestine 23 years ago. And She get a gift from the audience a bag and a colorful tatreeze from Palestine.

The July evening is teeming with life. We don’t want to go home. The beers garden on the streets of Galway are bursting at the seams. I still raise my hands and hum “People Have the Power” And I look for Patti Smith in the crowd.

I have been walking

Wherefore am I walking

I been walking If you see me walking

(…)

Don’t turn away

I’m coming to you

(…)

Living in steps

from the song “Fireflies“.