The latest Irish Bard: BOBBY SANDS

66 DAYS ON HUNGER STRIKE
1 March 1981 to 5 May 1981

66 long days -- And during those days I could think of nothing but his suffering.
It preyed on my mind and pushed me to become active in the Northern AID movement in that  year of 1981. 

I HAVE NOT SPOKEN  HIS NAME ALOUD  FOR AWHILE, AND  SURELY  I HAVE NOT PRAISED  HIM FOR MANY YEARS IN PUBLIC.

But surely the time has come at last to praise--  
THE  LAST IRISH BARD --- BOBBY SANDS, MP.

And the driving force against oppression, as Bobby concludes, is the moral superiority of the oppressed.

Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such  an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation.  What a writing workshop he dared to  hold and to produce lines  that we see now are  monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.

* * *

"It has been said that were Bobby alive to see these poems today he would have rewritten or changed some of the simpler rhyming words. But that is to miss the point. These poems were written by a young man under the most depressing of conditions. More importantly his poetry is the raw literature of the H-Block prison protest which hundreds of naked men stood up against their cell doors (in the late of night when the Screws left the wings) to listen to and to applaud.

It was their only entertainment, it was a beautifully rendered articulation of their own plight. Out of cruelty and suffering Bobby Sands harnessed real poetry, the poetry of a feeling people struggling to be free..."

— Danny Morrison, October 1981.

Danny Morrison told it straight at the time. IT has taken me almost  40 years to read and  know the truth of his assessment.

---

MODERN TIMES

It is said we live in modern times,
In the civilised year of ‘seventy nine,
But when I look around, all I see,
Is modern torture, pain, and hypocrisy.

In modern times little children die,
They starve to death, but who dares ask why?
And little girls without attire,
Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire.

And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones,
Young children bury their parents’ bones,
And secret police in the dead of night,
Electrocute the naked woman out of sight.

In the gutter lies the black man, dead,
And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red,
And there was He who was born and came to be,
But lived and died without liberty.

As the bureaucrats, speculators and presidents alike,
Pin on their dirty, stinking, happy smiles tonight,
The lonely prisoner will cry out from within his tomb,
And tomorrow’s wretch will leave its mother’s womb!


We can see  from this poem that Bobby Sands was not a person with a narrow Nationalist vision; he had a dream of international solidarity.  He was seeking to forge a United Front with  all the oppressed of the world,

In her essay " Embodying Resistance: the Poetry of Bobby Sands", Fiona Mc Cann provides a detailed  analysis of Sands' work  and connects his  long poems of prison life to Oscar Wilde's  work--another  Irishman whose life was shortened by 5 years in an English  prison.

McCann writes:

 I propose to read Sands’ “Trilogy” as evidence of, as Lloyd puts it, “a re-vernacularisation of a literary ballad”, [Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”], forged under the conditions of distraint and distress out of which the collective re-emerges against cellular isolation”. I will firstly investigate the tension between the individual and the collective group before analysing the representation of torture, particularly in the final part of the poem, subtitled “3 The Torture Mill – H Block”. This will lead me to a final discussion on Sands’ perspective on the interplay between art and politics.

9The structure of the whole poem, made up of 226 stanzas, is similar to that of Wilde’s famous ballad: each stanza of the second and third parts of the poem is six lines long (those of the first part eight lines long) and all adhere to the alternate rhythm of iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter. The choice of ballad form not only establishes a link with an oral communal tradition perpetuated inside the H Blocks by the prisoners and, specifically, with Wilde’s prison experience, it also, through its very rigidity, mirrors the prison space in all its rigidity. It is significant that Sands opens the first part of the poem, “The Crime of Castlereagh”, with an assertion of his individuality:

• 29 Sands, op. cit., p. 104.

I scratched my name and not for fame
Upon the whitened wall;
“Bobby Sands was here,” I wrote with fear
In awful shaky scrawl.
I wrote it low where eyes don’t go
Twas but to testify,
That I was sane and not to blame
Should here I come to die

 LOVER OF BIRDS
I learn from  doing the reading of Bobby's now published prison diary that that Bobby Sands and I share something--we both love  birds.  Of course the Sky lark is  central to his poems but also the curlew and the  crows  play their part in relieving his sense of isolation  in his cell  as he is slowly dying over 66 days,

Here from a diary he  kept for the first 17 days of his Hunger strike:

"The birds were singing today. One of the boys threw bread out of the window. At least somebody was eating!
I was lonely for a while this evening, listening to the crows caw as they returned home. Should I hear the beautiful lark, she would rent my heart. Now, as I write, the odd curlew mournfully calls as they fly over. I like the birds.
Well, I must leave off, for if I write more about the birds my tears will fall and my thoughts return to the days of my youth.
They were the days, and gone forever now. But I enjoyed them. They are in my heart -- good night, now."
This from a man who was  just 27 years old when he died and had spent the last 9 years in brutal imprisonment. His love of the natural world and of the small free creatures  shines here.

Bobby Sands also  skewered the role of the renowned Irish poets who did not join their voices to his but who hid behind the aesthetic
masks :

The Men of Art have lost their heart,
They dream within their dreams.
Their magic sold for price of gold
Amidst a people’s screams.
They sketch the moon and capture bloom
With genius, so they say.
But ne’er they sketch the quaking wretch
Who lies in Castlereagh.

• 64 Ibid., p. 111.

The poet’s word is sweet as bird,
Romantic tale and prose.
Of stars above and gentle love
And fragrant breeze that blows.
But write they not a single jot
Of beauty tortured sore.
Don’t wonder why such men can lie,
For poets are no more.64

21Those two stanzas encapsulate a scathing criticism of what Sands perceives as a reprehensible lack of interest in the prison protest by writers in the North. Once again, there is a clear sense that the pastoral mode which Sands evidently uses as a sort of umbrella for poetry and art more generally, is not only inadequate to the task of representing the prison protest but also works to eradicate it from sight. 

As much as he loved birds and nature he would not use  them to distract himself or his readers from the  terrors that man's inhumanity to man  has wreaked on the world and all its inhabitants.

 In putting these entries together on poets who changed the world, I have omitted many.  I decided to think about  the American experience later.  I also did not  go to the revolutionary poets from Russia like Mayakovsky and Akmatova and Yevtuschenko  who inspired so many later poets like Faiz and Hikmet and Neruda and Brecht.

Somehow,  I was not letting myself think of BOBBY.  But when I completed the Padraic Pearse entry, I could not stop there: I could not leave it as if no poet bard had died for Ireland since Pearse.  That would be a lie.

YES, there was one other giant-- BOBBY SANDS.

Even now I know that there are many whose teeth are set on edge at the very thought of him. 

This blog is not for them.

But there are others who have come to see that he was a great leader and martyr and poet.

THIS BLOG ENTRY IS FOR YOU  AND YOUR SACRED MEMORY---MISE EIRE--  BOBBY SANDS.