Your beliefs
My beliefs.
Do we wear them like a coat
From childhood?
Do they grow with us
As we stretch to the trees?
Lively bright children
In separate playgrounds.
Can beliefs
Be like a disease?
Are your beliefs
Why you hate me?
Finally I see.
Finally I see.
The beliefs I was given
As a child accompanied me
For miles and miles.
I carried them
In an invisible rucksack.
I had no concept of that then.
My beliefs were, in the main
What was available to me
On my menu, we both had one.
Picked by someone else.
The menus for me and you
Was all we could do.
You seemed so far away from me
And when we met at eighteen
After all these years of separation
It was disorientating.
Drunk on culture, injected.
These beliefs of difference
Often scoffed at now
By our children
Are still amongst us.
They honker down
Deep in our gut.
Stuck in the rut
From others cart wheels.
A sectarian bacteria, placed there.
The disease lives and breathes.
For at the age of eighteen
You still can’t wind the clock back
And even if you think
Your mind hasn’t been invaded
By one brand or another
You will bark
Like any well trained dog
If tested and the deed is done.
Your bark and your bite
Are rigged within you.
Who gave permission
For you to give away your rights at birth?
Those who know better.
The church, the state?
Those who have cut up our cake
For us to eat in small slices
Trained over time.
So even though our genetics
Are essentially the same.
North East Ireand
And South West Scotland
We think of ourselves
As different.
Different because of our beliefs
A conjuring trick to the wearer.
The same coat with
Different labels.
Can you take it back
For a refund?
Sometimes I wish I could
But there is no bleach
Strong enough ever
To rhett out this bog of broken ideas
Or return us
To the innocence of the cot.
A northern Irish artist.
Rightly or wrongly I believe that a woman is a human mammal
who ovulates, menstruates, may become pregnant by a man,
give birth, suckle a child at her breasts, and in time has a menopause.
Enoch Burke seems to share my view and is bring punished for it.
My sister, A Doctor, taught by Eamon de Valera Jr in the 1960s
was told that there were rare occasions where things were not quite
so simple.
But Stampedes of two- legged mammals equipped with male sexual organs
into female dressing rooms, toilets. hospital wards and prisons is piss-taking a bit far.
Overly simplistic “let’s get alongerism”.
it’s not Randall’s beliefs or my beliefs that is/was the problemn in N of I society.
it was the brutal suppression of an indigenous people, their culture, language and traditions. Enforced by a uniformed armed militia of those chosen for their thuggery and loyalty to a foreign state, and white washed by a bureaucracy, judiciary, media, BBC, UTV etc. it was the denial of equality, housing, jobs, democracy, gerrymandering. it was the encouragement and arming of loyalist cartels when all of the above was insufficient in holding back the demands for freedom, justice and equality.
All the fine platitudes from unionist “poets” doesn’t change that and iota.
From a republican, or nationality perspective it was never about a unionists religious beliefs. We really don’t care, we are as happy with Presbyterianism as we are with Methodism, Baptists, Mormons, Orthodox Christians, Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic faiths. They are of little significance.
What does matter is support or opposition to the uniformed thugs who seized our national territory, oppressed our people, armed their B-Specials, RUC, UDR, SAS, PARAS, UVF, UDA, Glenanne Gangs, Ulster Resistance etc. An entire library of well armed murderous control of pur people.
it was about a belief system that says, The Irish are entitled to be free people, exercising sovereignty in their own national territory..
There is a place of equality in such a society for those from a different background than Irish Nationalism. But the addiction to armed gangs, uniformed or otherwise, needs to change
Try putting that in a poem.
And the “decent” Protestant people of Northern Ireland who election after election voted in the Gerrymandering Sectarian Discriminating bigots The same DPPs who over 2000 times every year marched through our towns and villages.. Declaring that this was a Protestant State for a Protestant people and was going to stay that way forever.. But your rather confused Protestant Muse has apparently lived a very sheltered life and the shock might just be too much… Ah what’s the point, you just don’t have a clue.. Northern Ireland was and is a Sow’s Ear and even Shakespeare couldn’t make it seem a Silk Purse..