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Inspiration I have looked for inspiration in all these streets: some now forgotten by man, only recalled by the dust and the dead; others set on the possibility of the here and the now. I have looked for the unmarked grave and stood at the memorials, touched shoulders with both the grieving and the fallen. I have observed the minute’s silence and cried out in celebration when the guns were laid down. I have walked the roads of Omagh, of Kingsmill, Greysteel and Enniskillen, tramped the dirt down in Belfast, Derry, Londonderry, Maiden City, and in everywhere, found a future that longs to be free of its past. I have looked to the faces of strangers claiming one side of the road their own, then shook hands with those brave enough to cross over and defy a generation’s fear, to age together and remove the mote from each other’s eye, free to weep and see again in the new light of forgiveness. I have seen my people be held back by the talons of identity, by labels of name and school and townland that they could not control, then be embraced by those who dared not to care, who only want to know the person and not the percentage they fall within. I have looked over the peace walls and found the same families in the same houses, too busy surviving to worry about who’s on the other side. I have seen wastelands reclaimed as skate parks, a sunken ship raised up and made into a conqueror, the slogans of hate painted over by artists who only want to tell you how great it is to be here and alive today. We have been measured by kerbstone and telegraph pole, pinpoints in our great country of distance, where a land can be void of landmark, where there is uncaged air, open billows of peace, where words may be sifted and stored and history transformed in the furnace of tolerance and compassion to award the outsider with a tale worth retelling. |
Intimidation We have come to dance, Yet you came to change our steps: You beat us into your custom With bigger sticks and guns Than any of us can return. Surely we agreed To the way which we should speed; But minority joins minority And another until the Demons in their numbers Out-sin the majority. Hold hands, unite, Everything will be… safe? If only we believed and feared In the common brotherhood of man. |