Who could, even in the goriest movie,

Tell the tale of blood and guts

That I saw now – no matter how he filmed it!

I guarantee you every effect would fail,

Our minds cannot deal with such terror

Beside which all representation must pale.

If one could pile up all the wounded

Who once on Vinegar Hill

Mourned their blood, spilled by the Brits,

And those from that long siege,

Fed on a diet of ‘dogs, mice

                      and candles’, as Kee writes,

And pile them with the ranks mown down

On the banks of the Boyne,

And with all the bodies left sliced apart

In heaps by Cú Chulainn, and add those

Torn apart by car bombs or letter bombs,

Conquered, weaponless, on the way to work –

If all these dismembered and maimed were brought

Together, the scene would be nothing to

Compare to Zone 8, Area I’s bloody sight.

No wine cask with its staves all ripped apart

Gaped wider than this man I saw split

From his chin                        to where we fart.

His guts hung out,

       I saw his lungs, his liver,

          and the coiled tube that turns all to shit.

While I stared at his inner organs

He caught my eye and with both hands

Opened     his chest: ‘See how I tear myself!

Another, with no legs, and his throat slit,

And his nose torn off

                               to where his eyebrows met,

Who had stopped to gawp like all the rest,

Stepped out of the group and opened up

His throat to speak:

‘You there, who walk this path uncondemned,

Remember the face of Seamus Twomey

Who planted the car bomb in Donegal Street,

Killing six, and maiming more than the

Souls you see here. And tell those

Dealers from Bogside, Martin and Shaun,

That if our foresight here is no deception,

They’ll be turfed off a yacht in Lough Neagh,

To feed the fishes, by a double-dealing crook.’

‘If you want me to tell your story up above,’

I said, ‘tell me now, who is that one without

Lips or tongue, who hides at your side?’

At that, he laid his fist on this one’s hair,

Dragging him up for us to see, and cried:

‘Here he is, and he is mute.

This civil servant stood at Thatcher’s arm

And drowned her doubts: he swore that men who

Are prepared to fast should be prepared to die.’

How helpless and confused he looked,

His tongue lopped off as far down as the throat,

This curio who once spoke with such assurance.

Then one who had both arms, but no hands,

And no ears,

                     raised his stumps in the air

And cried: ‘No doubt you remember

Michael McKevitt, who refused to

Give up the bloody struggle, and took