With the historic Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland in 1972 published earlier this week, we have a timely reflection here on those events…
One Sunday
Every Sunday teatime, the same:
salad or sandwiches, tinned fruit, tinned milk, cake –
a BBC drama series on TV: Children of the New Forest
where I learned to fear the Roundheads for ousting a hopeless king
and hid with velvet lordlings behind the sofa
as grim-faced men pound sword-hilts on the door.
And how I dreaded Madame Defarge,
cackling, toothless, pipe clamped in her jaw,
knitting beside the guillotine while heads bounce into baskets.
Biggest nightmare: Last of the Mohicans,
Magwa, tomahawk man, sudden as snake-bite,
wolf-howl warlord of the shaved and tattooed Huron.
The Six O’Clock News and I watch
dazed people stagger, bleeding, through a hail of bullets
as the city burns and raiders loot their homes
and the newsreader says that this is Britain.
* Beverly Ellis is a poet working in the east of England. She studied American Literature at Warwick University, has a PGC in Creative Writing from UEA and is planning to start an MA in the autumn.