Kate Rice ✍ with a poem.
Provenance
Where did I get it?
From where did it come?
Bogland slip and green hill
Slow bodhrán drum.
♞♜♝
Pipe and fiddle fighting
Music long and loud
Are you ashamed of where you ‘re from?
Worse still - are you proud?
♞♜♝
Green and orange mixing
A burial shade of brown
Do you come from rage and hunger?
I come from County Down.
♞♜♝
Ancestor in the Turf Lodge
The Catholic overflow
Do you know what that past makes you?
Ask me! I’ll say no.
♞♜♝
Boats on Scottish waters
When did your blood arrive?
I’m Irish, I say, boat or not
Since before I’ve been alive.
♞♜♝
A father born to British views
Would he still love my face?
He does not know his little girl;
She’s from a different place.
♞♜♝
You the Shankill, him the Falls
Mo chara, I yearn to be seen
Cut me, Ireland. Cut me deep!
Your daughter’s bleeding green.
⏩Kate Rice is a peace baby.
Our poetry, prose and when it was put to melody, songs, got us through some of our darkest hours.
ReplyDeleteI was in West Belfast during the war, when we would sing rebel songs as the Brits patrolled past the house. Radicals in Ballymurphy! 🙂
We were on an Ireland Anti-Internment Campaign demo once and a few thousand of us sung Joe McDonell to the Brits pointing guns at us, it was a spectacularly powerful day.
"And You Dare to Call Me, a Terrorist, While You Look Down Your Gun".
I remember the fear in their eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FfO1z_ttys&list=RD4FfO1z_ttys&start_radio=1
A beautiful and thought provoking poem Kate
ReplyDeleteKate is a lovely writer whatever she turns her hand to, poetry or prose. So good to have her on board
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