Little Knowing
Joanna Lavery's father was blown up
Carrying a bomb out of his pub.
Everyone said he was stupid,
He should have left it well alone.
I didn't know what to say to Joanna.
I ran away and cried.
Joanna had to come after me to say
"It's alright." But it wasn't.
When Uncle Jack was murdered,
He thought he was being robbed.
He said "If it's money ye're after,
I'll get it from the till". They shot him in the back
As he turned. Ronan was two then and when he said,
"Where my daddy? Where my daddy?"
Everybody cried. At school, Dara asked me
"Why weren't you at Daddy's funeral?"
"Mummy said I was too young."
"If I'm old enough to lose my father,
You're old enough to go to his funeral."she said.
When they blew up the square in Dungannon,
I couldn't get home. We'd to catch the bus in Castlecaufield,
All of us, from four different schools, it was.
I wound up on the bus to Armagh, slow to realise
We were travelling unfamiliar roads. For months after,
I heard the bomb blast every time a door closed.
Another time, waiting for a bus, funny enough,
I saw a car pull up outside Woolworth's,
A sudden slap of blood on this woman's blouse
Before she crumpled. I think she was dead.
I don't know. That's when the bus arrived.
All this is nothing, the backdrop,
Barely noticed, hardly worth mentioning.
It does not render me knowledgeable
About living in a violent society.
That privilege is preserved for those
Who threaded their way through the debris
Of the night before, the charcoaled streets
And burnt out cars, on their way to primary school.
Or Patricia Devlin, heroine, riddled with bullets
When her parents died. Sixteen she took and three
They couldn't get out. Seventeen years old,
She kept her brothers and sisters together,
Refusing the break-up of the family
People said was inevitable.
Or Mary Conaghan, who answered
The door one morning,
To men who shot her father.
He died in her arms.
She should have known better
Than to open the door.
....................................
Don't project onto me the notion
That I have some special knowledge of suffering.
When you pin me, pedestal my little knowing,
It is an insult to those who have suffered and survived.
It hurts more than to have what I know denied.