Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of…

I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform, A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave, Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-graveYou followed from Boyne water to the Balkans But miss the twilit note your flute should sound. You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue…