New Poems from Tomás Ó Cárthaigh

There Are No More
Horses Here

Once horses trotted ambled and gamboled
As children in rags so plain
Begged for pennies and bread
In sunshine and in rain
Sometimes knowing success
More times in vain.

Today cars sleek roll by
And no horses between these houses trot
And wagon wheels are replaced by rubber
The horses are forgot
It is as if they were never there
The dogs take in the scene the horses spot

And a cat ambles by, the least of all
As its ancestors did long before
As its young and their young will
When cars themselves are no more
Twin constants of life: Cats slinking on streets
And waves lapping the shore...

Bones in the
Sun

Only dust now they are
The dust to which we will all return
In our time, when it is up
Under the desert sun they burn
Bleached white, some are from skulls
More from legs or arms
Some were rich and more were poor
Townspeople, and more from farms...

Murdered, but its not genocide
To mention it it is a crime
No, not victims of Nazi Germany
These are from another time
These are victims of the Turks
And their Islamic allies, the Kurds
Victims of a massacre
That causes me to fail to find words...

Killed by starvation and marching
Not for them the decency of gas
Save a lucky few killed in a cave
All died and buried without a mass
When Hitler was asked about reaction
To the holocaust and those who died
"Who remembers the Armenians"
Were the words with which he replied...

And in today, our age of reason
I fail to understand how
We tolerate the affront of Turkey
And to deny we allow
This genocide of the Armenians
In the year 1915
Had it not occured, was stopped
The Holocaust might not have been...

Hatred in the Heart
of Olde England

They bought the land, we understand
With hard cash fair and square
But as they are not English folk
They cannot build their own park there
On land that they themselves own
As a blockade blocks the load
Of supplies for drainage and ancillary works
So they don't camp on the road
For their town is picturesque
In the heart of Old England
The truth's if your not white, English, Protestant
Your skin they cannot stand.

They will go to church on Sunday
Pompous righteous and proud
And boast how successful they are
How they gypsies were not allowed
To build a PROPER park, on land THEY own
By proper English folk
And as I read the comments of one
I thought how it was for racism a cloak
I live in an English house
That for some hundreds of years did stand
Built by Irish hands for English folk
Upon stolen land.

And the people dispossessed by Cromwell
And to Connaught could not go
And have walked the roads years since
The same hatred's they know.
England is equal they say for all
As long as your white
British and Protestant
Then you enjoy every right.
But should you not be so, alas
No rights is there for you
To be as bold to BUY your land!
What a thing for a gypsy to do!

You cannot camp upon the road
The locals don't like the stranger
Your children are running wild
And are a source of danger.
You are the least of Gods children
And for you they do not care
They wish you did not exist
Were not among them, were elsewhere
They glory of the beauty of England
But hate is in their heart
Pretty houses hide hateful minds
Keen THEM from ME apart!