04-05-2025
Máiría Cahill: Painfully slow wheels of justice add to Kingsmill suffering
Today at 21:30
'When they massacred the ten linen workers/There fell on the road beside them spectacles/Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:/Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine'
Michael Longley's poem, The Linen Workers, cleverly symbolised a rupturing of life with scattered death, a disruption of the ordinary, depicting one huge freeze-frame of chaos. We can identify with that. The alternative, to describe the slaughter exactly, is beyond most of our processing abilities.
