Civic Responsibility

I wonder if there's a greater need than we acknowledge for civic responsibility to be inculcated in our children. I remember my grand aunt in her late eighties or early nineties saying after taking a fall, she was left sitting on the kerb in the middle of O'Connell St. This poem brushes up against the same issue.


On The Street.


He has her against the railings.

Holding his mouth up to her face
like a gun-barrel

he bawls;
words that burst clean into my sitting-room.

His fist, swinging in a small arc,
makes a soft sound of her cheek.

Inside,
with my marmalade coals curled up like a cat,

I ask myself what I should do,
taking till they've gone to reach no decision.