Home Thoughts....At a distance, it was hard to feelthe blank immediacy of shock, the gaps blasted in lives by bags of nitrate intended for the increase of the yield for which they thanked their god each year in harvest services. The smell lingered in car-boots after planting, instead of scenting the good earth in small fields. The land was fought for no longer with billhook and plough, the tools of farmer and quarryman spawning bomb and ambush, the seeds of destruction sown by country folk. And on holidays home uncertainties returned, the parked car outside the pub, a bag by the bar that might be zeroing to the next outrage. Meanwhile they pretended things were better, condemned your exile's caution, urged normal behaviour. They waited indifferently at roadblocks, avoided politics in conversation, and showed a grim relief when the latest victim wasn't one of ours; features of a strange normality, in which the meanest casualty was truth. URL: www.mourne.net/thoughts.htm |