Colm

 

Go on home British soldiers, go on home

she sang spinning: insatiable, manic

with out-of-her-mind laughter.

 

Her mind flashed back to Colm, buried

in that graveyard for fifteen years,

his ideals decayed as his corpse.

 

So he died in the Spring of his years,

forever young; died at Easter

like our great patriots and Jesus himself.

 

People’s comforts were no help.

He died at sixteen, he was dead,

for her, that was the only fact.

 

He seemed so cool in that April sunshine, 

that broke over the ramshackle Falls houses

as he sang Mother Mary comes to me,

 

singing words of wisdom, let it be,

But still the soldiers had blasted his dreams

and brains from his skull.

 

Few knew those rarer John Lennon lyrics:

not a soldier boy was bleeding

when they nailed the coffin lids. She did.

 

Fifteen years later, prostrate as in some desperate

prayer, she collapsed on the floor and called

across all those wide white years, Colm, Colm, Colm  

Reviews

[Steve]

This is incredibly sad. And some think of dying that way to be a honorable way to go.......OMFG Its in reality a waste.