After the parade, before the rain The homeless reclaim their streets Amonsgt the discarded plastic tri-colours The sweet papers that fall at children's feet You can feel the ghosts of ******* babies From Tuams' religious care home Dancing in some purgatory parade No coffins ever granted to rest in peace They rise from a decommissioned sewer pit Free now to march as they eternally carry The burden of a society's Christian sin Look to today, why dwell on the past An oft cried refrain as we do it again Where the pubs overflow with national pride For a fifth century Welsh missionary man Who bestowed upon us an organised religion From a politically divided Northern hill Inside the boys make the noise in Celtic tops Singing old rebel songs of English wrongs Children outside, whose to seek, whose to hide A national passage as another mother cries She prays for the end and for morning again To sweep through these fractured streets To wash through these wretched sins For after every parade once more must come A forgiving frontal rain to make way for the sun