Bobby Sands - A Place To Rest

As the day crawls out another night crawls in
Time neither moves nor dies.
It’s the time of day when the lark sings,
The black of night when the curlew cries.

There’s rain on the wind, the tears of spirits
The clink of key on iron is near,
A shuttling train passes by on rail,
There’s more than God for man to fear.

Toward where the evening crow would fly, my thoughts lie,
And like ships in the night they blindly sail,
Blown by a thought — that breaks the heart —
Of forty women in Armagh jail.

Oh! and I wish I were with the gentle folk,
Around a hearthened fire where the fairies dance unseen,
Away from the black devils of H-Block hell,
Who torture my heart and haunt my dream.

I would gladly rest where the whin bush grow,
Beneath the rocks where the linnets sing
In Carnmoney Graveyard ‘neath its hill
Fearing not what the day may bring!



BOBBY SANDS was twenty seven years old when he died on the sixty sixth day of hunger-strike in the H-Block prison hospital, Long Kesh, on the 5th May 1981. The young IRA Volunteer who had spent almost the last nine years of his short life in prison as a result of his Irish republican activities was, by the time of his death, world-famous having been elected to the british parliament and having withstood pressures, political and moral (including an emissary from Pope John Paul II) , for him to abandon his fast which was aimed at countering a criminalisation policy by the british government. His name became a household word in Ireland, and his sacrifice (as did that of those who followed him) overturned british propaganda on Ireland and had a real effect in advancing the cause of Irish freedom.

Bobby Sands

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