Do Éirinn.

They taught the map to hunger 
folding oceans into pockets,
stitching borders like bruises on skin.
England is a monster in a waistcoat,
a polite horror setting the kettle,
fingers working the noose behind the lace.
She smiles with teeth of empire,
presses civility over open wounds,
calls theft "civilisation" and names it kindly.

They watched the Black and Tans arrive like thunder,
boots full of winter, laughter cut like knives,
khaki ghosts with the scent of burned thatch.
They tramped hedgerows into testimony,
dragged dawn through gable-doors,
turned hearths into evidence,
left children’s songs in ash.
They made a sport of small lights:
a boy’s bicycle, a woman’s shawl,
the hymn a priest had taught the church.
They beat the old roads into scars,
stitched fear into the seams of villages,
burned names into smoke so families could not read them.

But read the file on James Connolly 
a heart already punctured by the fight,
tied to a chair like a dying animal trapped;
they shot the wounded poet-publican,
executed courage with a legal calm 
a bullet footnoted in a forged report,
the page turned as if nothing had been lost.
They taught the scaffold to wear a collar,
and made murder look administrative,
while they filed the name away with polite precision.

And when the ledger needed new entries
they folded the same tactics into union jack'ed parcels,
and stamped them for Palestine with a courteous hand 
same boots, new dust, old contempt learning a new map.

Violence became a commodity shipped by route numbers,
blood orders written in the language of efficiency,
the colonies taught to recognise the cadence of a boot.

They taught children not to say their own names out loud,
made Celtic tongues contraband in the grammar of classrooms.
Irish syllables smothered under slate and ruler,
Welsh lullabies punished into whispers behind stage curtains.
Language became rebellion and was punished; accordingly,
to speak the old vowels was to remember the theft.

Then they let starvation be the slow verdict 
for the men who refused to convert suffering into silence.

The hunger strikers unmade themselves so history wouldn't forget,
and the state counted hours while bodies thinned into testimony.
They would not bend, and the machine watched patience do the killing.

Six counties lie stitched like an experiment,
a partition sold as peace, a border imposed with manners.
Home Rule offered a polite leash: autonomy without keys,
a compromise that kept the map’s theft intact.
Lines drawn with a steady hand that never trembled at conscience.

Remember the Battle of the Bogside, 

that summer like a throatful of stone,
windows full of fists, air thrown with the sharp music of rocks.
Children learned geometry from slings and courage from curfew,
stones teaching distance, fists teaching forecast.
Across the sea the same shape of youth 

bent into a resistance,
Palestine’s children choosing pebbles over promises,
their hands practicing the arc that memory repeats.
A stone is a syllable in the language of refusal,
a small shape of rebellion thrown from the jaw of the poor.

In Derry the rioters built up barricades with hymnbooks and crates,
shouting like a choir that had learned how to throw its voice.
The gas and the batons answered, then helicopters hummed,
and the world watched news cameras breathe in the burning.
In Gaza the children learn the same calculation

where to aim, how to split the sky,

a pebble’s lesson transcribed from rubble to radio.

The same echo moves — stone to stone, shore to shore,
a tornado of resistance that refuses to be polite.

Look at this modern ledger: 

Palestine, Kenya, Iraq, Aden 
names repeated like case studies in a colonial textbook.
Regimes set up like models, police trained in the grammar of occupation,
bureaucracies hummed into life with old orders and new stamps.
Now they sit in parlours and call empire a museum piece,
display it in glass and call it history’s error.
But the teeth are kept, the jaw remembers how to bite,
and policies born in the heart of polite rooms
still speak in the tongues of checkpoint and curfew.

I am not borne of that soil; yet I do not claim Connolly’s blood,
only the witness of pages, the memory of tongues forbidden.
Romance here is political: love for a civic truth, not a flag
a tenderness for tongues and the right to speak them aloud.
Taught to love a country that learned to love itself by carving others,
and so now that love is cataloguing, remembering, naming.

Singing the banned languages into the streets 
Gaelic, Cymraeg, the names they tried to erase.
Let English be a bridge, not a bridle; 

let apology mean action.

Teach children to count in many tongues, to sling stones into memory,
to keep maps on tables and the truth under pillows.
Unpack the uniforms from museum boxes, read the dispatches aloud,
let the pages breathe accusation and call the monster by name.

Keep the names of the tied and the fasting like constellations,
Connolly ringing like a bell that will not be muffled,
Ten hunger strikers a litany that outlives verdicts.

Link the Bogside’s stones to Gaza’s thrown pebbles 
one arc of resistance across a brittle map,
a single language of refusal taught by children’s hands.

We will keep on speaking until borders answer,
until the six counties name themselves without scissors.
We will keep holding maps to light, tracing the cuts with our fingers,
demanding returns larger than apology’s pale coin.
Let the monster in the waistcoat feel the weight of being named,
and let the tongues it hushed fill the air like bread rising.
We will throw stones and syllables until the glass jars break,
until the uniforms hang empty and the museums return what they stole.