Chairman, Galway West Labour Youth, April 5th, 1984
after a photograph by John Cunningham
The future is the thin pale youth
staring definitely into the camera. Hours
shy of his seventeenth birthday. After
the main speaker concludes,
he’ll play with his biro and ask
if anyone has any
questions. He no longer follows
the football results quite
as closely as he used to, couldn’t tell you
who’s on Top Of The Pops
this evening, but knows he’s for a
socialist South Africa,
if not what it means
to sit top table with a man
who once shared a cell
with Nelson Mandela.
He hadn’t a clue
these decades later his big ideas
would have gotten so little; that the truth
is what sense you can make
of a notebook from twenty years ago,
found at the bottom of a box;
your name
on the attendance list of a meeting
full of people you definitely
never met.
KEVIN HIGGINS
Latest posts by Kevin Higgins (see all)
- Ode To The Minister For State Security - May 23, 2013
- Alternative Proposals - April 22, 2013
- Chairman, Galway West Labour Youth, April 5th, 1984 - October 5, 2012
- Anatomy of a Public Outcry - June 13, 2012
- Son of Capitalism - May 14, 2012
October 9, 2012 11:58 am
Apartheid was a moral evil in that it set up the white minority as overlords over millions of black South Africans. It was morally correct for people in democratic societies like Ireland to oppose it, no matter how ineffective peaceful protests, commodity boycotts and vigils by writers and artists may have been. Those who opposed apartheid twenty or thirty years ago can still maintain an interest in current South Africa by visiting the country and enquiring into the development of political culture since the system was replaced in the multiracial elections of 1994. Student idealism dwindles as the years go by. The urge to participate in social change projects and programmes diminishes because of personal financial and family obligations. The world never turns out exactly as a 17-year-old hopes it would. Is that a good reason why most of us, in our 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s+ should just shrug and spend our time perusing the newspaper sports pages, drowning our sorrows in pubs or fluttering our disposable money on race horses?
December 21, 2012 10:23 pm
All our autobiographies? Great poem, Kevin.