My father kept a scrapbook in the cupboard

by Mary Pooley

My father kept a scrapbook in the cupboard
Black pages thick with newspaper cuttings
Of the faces of the tortured and the dead,
Sepia on black, black ink on brown.
Black and tan spat from the pages everywhere.
“Now is it any harm to kill them?” he cried
when, in my new found independence,
I questioned it.

Reproduced with kind permission of the author. This poem was composed in Poetry as Commemoration workshops held at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum on 20th and 21st of September, 2023. The workshops were led by poet Thomas McCarthy.