Author's Commentary
This is a poem I wrote sometime ago after a very strange conversation with a American friend annoyed me a bit, should say it is directed at him and not at an entire nation (so no offence intended)
You talk as if terror is something that tangible that you can battle
or wipe away with the edge of your sleeve, like a smudge on the glass,
behaving like it is something new, and no one has been afraid before.
You do not like when I laugh at you, but it is funny how you like your slogans
as if life itself was just another movie, and there will be a happy Hollywood ending.
This war is like an advertising campaign, but I am not sure what you are selling
and you seem to have forgotten that it was dollars and dimes
that paid to rip my country apart, one misguided nationalist at a time.
The old boys brigade would go to the States begging,
singing songs about a united Ireland
and would come back home with the funding to paint the streets in blood.
I remember bomb scares on Monday morning, where we would gather on the basketball courts
in our parochial uniforms, giggling, while spitting childish hate at the school across the road.
We were saddened, but not surprised by shattered families,
because fathers coming home safe on a Friday was not a certainty,
and we knew that death was waiting.
I remember crossing the Ha’penny bridge and feeling it rock
beneath my feet because of a nearby explosion, and then finishing our shopping
before going home to see if ours were of the dead.
Now you are surprised by your own fear, and lash out like a child might do,
a country of children all stamping their feet with misguided anger.
One great big multimillion-dollar temper tantrum.
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