There is a popular public house in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter named the John Hewitt. I am delighted with this name …
Born in this island, maimed by history and creed-infected,
by my father taught, the stubborn habit of unfettered thought
I dreamed, like him, all people should be free
So, while my logic steered me
well outside that ailing church that claims dominion over the questing spirit,
I denied all credence to the state by rebels won from a torn nation,
rigged to guard their gain, though they assert their love of liberty,
which craft has narrowed to a fear of Rome.
So, since this ruptured country is my home,
it long has been my bitter luck to be
caught in the crossfire of their false campaign.
Here at a distance, rocked by hopes and fears with each convulsion of that fevered state,
the chafing thoughts attract, in sudden spate, neglected shadows from my boyhood years:
the Crossley tenders caged and roofed with wire, the crouching Black and Tans,
the Lewis gun, the dead lad in the entry: one by one the Catholic public houses set on fire:
the anxious curfew of the summer night, the thoroughfares deserted,
at a door three figures standing, till the tender’s roar, approaching slower,
drives them out of sight: and on the broad roof of the County Gaol
the singing prisoners brief freedom take
to keep an angry neighbourhood awake with rattled plate and pot and metal pail:
below my bedroom window, bullet-spark along the kerb,
the beat of rapid feet of the lone sniper, clipping up the street,
soon lost, the gas-lamps shattered, in the dark:
and on the paved edge of our cinder-field, intent till dusk upon the game,
I ran against a briskly striding, tall young man,
and glimpsed the rifle he thought well-concealed.
At Auschwitz, Dallas, I felt no surprise
when violence, across the world’s wide screen, declared the age imperiled:
I had seen the future in that frightened gunman’s eyes. …