It is said we live in modern times, <br />In the civilised year of 'seventy nine, <br />But when I look around, all I see, <br />Is modern torture, pain, and hypocrisy. <br /> <br />In modern times little children die, <br />They starve to death, but who dares ask why? <br />And little girls without attire, <br />Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire. <br /> <br />And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones, <br />Young children bury their parents' bones, <br />And secret police in the dead of night, <br />Electrocute the naked woman out of sight. <br /> <br />In the gutter lies the black man, dead, <br />And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red, <br />And there was He who was born and came to be, <br />But lived and died without liberty. <br /> <br />As the bureaucrats, speculators and presidents alike, <br />Pin on their dirty, stinking, happy smiles tonight, <br />The lonely prisoner will cry out from within this tomb, <br />And tomorrow's wretch will leave its mother's womb! <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />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.<br /><br />Bobby Sands<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/modern-times-4/
