Do Not Believe What You Hear On The News

if just one of you passes this on in America or England you would be helping, we need to bring attention to this, I cannot believe what is happening. This is not poetry I admit, this is shock

Motionless, as in some nightmare, I stood

on roads edged with timber-framed pubs -

where some beloved relation was interned.

Somnolent silence torn by children's screams

on seen-it-all before Bogside streets

 

That car engine alone was active, a nine-year-old

glued helpless, hysterical, to the windscreen

as if giving one final hug to a family member

taken without the dignity of flashing lights,

sirens, human rights, like three decades ago.

And all the Bogside neglected to look

 

"Walk on, love," a white-haired woman states,

perhaps her husband was interned thirty years ago,

her son jailed now, I walk on, seconds later,

the car speeds off with this little boy still

on top, and he bounces free onto concrete,

a miracle he wasn't thrown under the laws wheels.

 

There were lots of white-faced ghosts in town,

talking of innocent sons, husbands, fathers,

interned and I think whether the Bogside

was again barren of youth as in seventy-one.

This is nothing short of a war crime, please help,

and "Do not believe what you hear on the news."

Reviews

[LR Young]

Maybe I am missing it.... I'm not quite sure what is happening. I am well aware of the place and the time, and the long history of Bogside but I am not quite sure what I am seeing. Why was the boy on the car? Does he die? As of now, and maybe I am just being a stupid American (entirely possible) - the biggest tragedy are those who tell us to "walk on, love" - to ignore violence, or each other.

[TL Boehm]

riveting. None of us are immune to becoming numb to the callousness...the casual cruelty...a raw, necessary write.

[mick weller]

how can we know without seeing and feeling? Seeing another side

[Tony]

I like what you are saying in this piece Sel, how it is so easy for society to ignore the most vulnerable, it is easy to turn the face away, it is pathetic in many ways and the media only lets us see whatever they chose. People in power and authority dictate that. Great piece. Thank you Emily for leading me here.

Antony

[Sel Whiteley]

Over the weekend, there was something called Operation Dissent, aiming to tackle dissident Republicans, those still against the peace process. The problem seems to have been, and I am no longer sure of the scale of the problem, that a number of innocent men were arrested because they were suspected of being 'dissident Republicans.' I saw this little boy climb on top of the policecar and then the policecar drive off with this little boy still on top. He shook himself free but I couldn't believe I'd seen the police drive with a little boy on top. For me, that was shocking. My Northern Irish friend didn't see the link either so I think I need to make it clearer.

[Dezaraye]

I stopped trusting the news as a teenager when my father was deployed to Iraq. They lie ...

Thank you for sharing the truth with us. This IS shocking and devastating.

[W.k.kortas]

And we've been told it's all hugs and smiles in Derry and The Bogside, but hate dies very hard. Wonderful eye for detail and description, and, as the wise Ms. Young notes, it is the ignoring the violence, or being numbed into inaction by it, that is portrayed so effectively here. Very fine writing.

[Emily B]

this is shocking, terrifying . . . especially when we consider what the news won't tell us