Michael Longley was a poet of Ireland. His friend Seamus Heaney described him as a “custodian of griefs and wonders.”
I admire Longley’s poem “Wounds,” which mourns senseless violence. It was written during The Troubles of Northern Ireland.
The poet begins with two pictures of his father. One is of an officer who went over the top at the Somme during World War I. The second is of his father following a chaplain covering corpses.
Later, the poet buries others beside him:
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
These three are the “soldiers” of a civil war — a polite term for organized murder. They are buried with the pack of cigarettes and matches that traditionally go into the graves of war dead. But what little ceremonies are appropriate for the dead man in the uniform of a bus conductor, killed beside his carpet-slippers, shot in the head by a shivering boy?
• Source: “Wounds” is available at the Poetry by Heart website:
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