Happy Halloween. A lucky dip into the archive re-visits a Halloween Party given at the local open prison for a group of mentally handicapped young adults. It was a stunningly joyful event, staged in the coffee shop that is open to the public, but also open to inmates. Joy can be found in the saddest places sometimes.
I am minded today of the Arundrati Roy quote to seek joy in the saddestplaces. We need to be reminded of joy and a prison qualifies as a sad place, but my husband and I and about fifty souls witnessed it yesterday in our local low security prison. I feel it warrants memorialising in my poetry journal. As backstory for you to understand the context of how it came about, I need to explain that they run a coffee shop that is open to the public, as well as having a car wash and polytunnels where you can buy plants. This is a bank holiday weekend in Ireland so there were a lot of visitors about the campus on a Sunday. The barristas in the coffee shop had been chatting to some of the regulars who work with a group of disabled young adults locally. They cooked up the…
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