Sorry For Your Troubles. Pádraig Ó Tuama  

these deaths and these bereavements we don’t even have the agreed language on the name of the place where these troubled things happened. Between 1969 and 2001, 3526 people lost their lives in what has come to be known as The Troubles. This is roughly 2% of the population of [the]north[ern][of]ireland. In 2010 it was estimated that 107,000 people suffered some physical injury as a result of the conflict. The statistics people estimate that up to 500,000 people are affected by grief, ailments, or trauma following the troubles.

      If we called it The Bereavements would we weigh the number more heavily?

      And me? I’m just a Corkman writing poems about histories I didn’t share. ‘What’s it like for you to live in this foreign country?’ a Belfast Protestant man asked me once. That same morning a Catholic man had said to me, ‘I love your city, Belfast and Cork are the two best cities, but those Dublin fellas? They’re wankers.’ Perhaps we are all always local and foreign to each other. Neighbour, stranger and enemy.

      In the name of the neighbour

      And of the stranger

      And in the shadowed shelter of each other.

      Amen.

      One time I sat in a room with a Catholic woman whose dad had been shot dead in an ambush. She’d heard that one of the ambulance men, a Protestant, had never again been right after his shift that day.

      ‘There’s many as weren’t killed that still died,’ she said. And she was right.

      T h e F a c t s o f L i f e

      That you were born

      and you will die.

      That you will sometimes love enough

      and sometimes not.

      That you will lie

      if only to yourself.

      That you will get tired.

      That you will learn most from the situations

      you did not choose.

      That there will be some things that move you

      more than you can say.

      That you will live

      that you must be loved.

      That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.

      That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg

      of two people who once were strangers

      and may well still be.

      That life isn’t fair.

      That life is sometimes good

      and sometimes even better than good.

      That life is often not so good.

      That life is real

      and if you can survive it, well,

      survive it well

      with love

      and art

      and meaning given

      where meaning’s scarce.

      That you will learn to live with regret.

      That you will learn to live with respect.

      That the structures that constrict you

      may not be permanently constraining.

      That you will probably be okay.

      That you must accept change

      before you die

      but you will die anyway.

      So you might as well live

      and you might as well love.

      You might as well love.

      You might as well love.

      h u n g e r s t r i k e r s

      And there was banging on the bins that night

      and many frightened people woke

      and noted down the hour.

      The clock of hunger-strikers dead is not ignored

      with ease

      and ‘please, God, please keep loved ones safe’

      was then

      repeated round and round and round

      like rosaries told upon a bead,

      or shoes upon the ground of orange walking.

      The five demands, the five-year plan

      that saw a blanket round a man,

      the dirty protest, Thatcher stance,

      that gave a new and startling glance

      at just how deep a people’s fury goes.

      And God knows each single mother’s son

      was sick of hunger,

      all those younger faces became stripped and old

      eyes shrunk back and foreheads cold & bold

      with skin that’s limp and paper thin,

      barely separating blood and bone from stone.

      And some did say ‘enough is now enough’

      and others said that ‘never, never, never will a

      martyr die,

      he’ll smile upon us long from mural’s wall’.

      And others said ‘what nation’s this?

      we’re abandoned on our own −

      all this for clothes to warm some dying bones’

      And some said ‘that’s a traitor’s talk’

      and others bowed their heads and thought that they

      would hate to go that way.

      Then Bobby Sands was dead

      and there was banging on the bin lids on the Falls

      echoed through to Shankill gospel halls.

      And there was trouble on the street that night

      and black flags started hanging while

      people started ganging up,

      black flags marking out the borders of belonging

      the thin black barricade

      that’s been around for thirty years

      and stayed a fragile point up till today and cries

      of how ten mothers’ sons all starved and died

      when all they ate was hope and pride.

      S a c r a m e n t a l

      If there is a heaven, and I’m not sure there’s not,

      at its harbour will be waters that we’ve travelled,

      sometimes seeing

      mostly not.

      And at its hearth will be people saying

      welcome, welcome, welcome

      to where you’ve always been a

      part of.

      Who knows where we started,

      or how this journey ends.

      All we know is that