Pulpit Musketry

 Pulpit Musketry.

People’s charity was only meant to stretch,
To putting a penny into a ceramic head,
Brown people turning up on the doorstep
Wasn’t ever part of the deal.

We brought them sanitation
For accepting subjugation,
Ornamentation for the gallows
To reward rebellion.

Grateful fawning over infested blankets
Was the only response necessary,
Decades of the rosary ensuring resurrection,
The power of the pulpit,
Multiplying musketry

by Ruairí de Barra

Kindly published in Live Encounters Magazine in their Special 10th Anniversary Edition, Volume II, December 2019. You can read the four poems in this special volume on the Live Encounters website or download a free .pdf copy just by clicking here.

Live Encounters is a wonderful publication and all of its issues, as well as special editions, may be found on its website at https://liveencounters.net/

I would like to thank Mark Ulyseas for seeing fit to include my work again in the same pages of some truly talented people.