The Verdict of Soldier F

The walls of Derry, they don't just whisper, they scream.
A guttural howl from Rossville Flats,
where the crimson gouged the tarmac,
a stain no verdict can wash clean.
To walk those streets,
feel the cold breath of ghosts clinging to every brick,
See the museum's silent, screaming evidence:
the gored cloth, a child's last breath,
The lead shrapnel torn from young flesh.

And the priest, murdered mid-prayer,
His cassock soaked, a sacred sacrifice.
Those rubber rounds, fat as a coloniser's thumb,
the bludgeon of Britain's 'law',
designed to brutalise,
to break the spirit,
not to save a soul.

This suffering, a jagged seam of pain through the Troubles,
a direct consequence of Britain's imperial hand,
from the blanket men's defiance,
to the hunger strikers' dying breaths,
Each sacrifice, a link in their chain.

The scars are not just on these walls,
but etched into the very soul of the people,
a generational wound that festers still.

It lives in the quiet grief of grandmothers,
the haunted eyes of men who remember,
In the stories whispered to children of a past that rages still.

Today, their colonial courts,
Britain's courts, an engine of injustice,
a deliberate absolution from a distant crown,
declared Soldier F. Exonerated. Absolved.

No justice in British courts.
No anomaly this.
Britain's crime against Ireland continued.
No shame, no remorse, no flicker of guilt
from the Crown that continues to occupy, to brutalise, to deny.

Another bullet in the heart of their hope,
another victory for the empire's cruel hand.
Their system, built on blood and lies.
It protects its own. The occupied bleed.

Their minds mangled, their futures stolen.
Justice, a cruel joke, never arrives.
Britain's flag still chokes their stolen land,
a constant wound, a daily insult.
The burden of history, heavy as stone,
in a land still held captive, still not their own.

This brutal legacy, a bitter inheritance,
passed down through generations of resistance.
Derry's memory burns.
The bullet holes in the walls accuse.
The very air chokes on it.

The enduring scars on the people testify.
And the people, unbowed, unbroken,
they raise a defiant voice, for the fallen,
for their freedom, against this imperial tyranny.

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