Would the Famine have happened if the Irish were armed?
Not with staves and pitchforks but with rifles and bombs.
Would all of their grain and their British bound beef
Been kept there in Ireland to give them relief?

We were serfs of a sort, slaves in our own land.
Against British oppression we had no chance to stand.
When our subsistence crop failed the absent landlord
Seized our pitiful homesteads and made them sheepfolds.

With the green grass of Ireland their final repast
Irish died by the thousands and their deaths weren’t fast.
Hunger, like Cancer, gnaws a man to the bone
They lie now in mass graves without even a stone.

The poor Irish Catholic was a man with no rights.
No wood for his coffin; No oil for his lights.
What “relief” was provided was cause for despair
as the hungry and  the dying built  roads to nowhere.

The coffin ships sailed and the old women weep.
Some took the soup and renounce their belief.
Such a strange Famine; it boggles the mind
That food was exported- it was sure genocide.

Then we had no rights they were bound to respect.
Their might gave them right to extort and collect.
We were then subject to their whim and decree
Till we learned to fight back and we made ourselves free.

Odd color
of trifling light
Flitting petal
blue-purple-gray
emerged from asphalt's
heated slumber
to lead some airy way--

The road forgot

You hold echoes of a shift
so plaintively
against the swell
of midnight summer rain—
within the roar of the planes
on cold faded glass
the stuffy air at the airport

There was no way around it
that I could see—
the world still kept its spinning

You lock your stare here
and how I wish
I was packed up too,

snug heartbeats in your leather briefcase.

© BT