H Block Blues (For Bobby Sands) ft. August Fanon Lyrics

In the twilight of my last morning

I

Will see my friends and you

And I'll go

To my grave

Regretting nothing but an unfinished song

Nazim Hikmet, Bursa Prison, Turkey, 1933

Tired of seeing his friends getting thrown against the wall by police

Under surveillance from the laundry van he didn't know peace

Part of the Muckerboys Long Kesh prison blues the walls are stained

He was inspired from the Battle of Bogside a cherished friend

KAI was the gang Kill All Irish, he hated them

Twinbrook Tenant's Association they started a childrеn's clinic

Local boxing and football clubs clanking mugs of Guinness

Reading James Connolly thеy taught each other Gaelic

Stealing matches and cigarettes from detectives during interrogations

In cage 11 he played guitar, he sang

The fairest flowers of their kind

These roses of the dark

"They are the light to guide the poor

These flowers in the dark

"I care not should we freemen die

To see the garden flower

And humble bluebells lift their heads

To rise in all their power

I hold a tear torn sore in heart

Twere e'r a Joan of arc

Tis each one of these saintly flowers

Who be in dungeons dark

"I scratched my name and not for fame

Upon the whitened wall

Bobby sands was here I wrote with fear

In awful shaky scrawl

"From cell to cell they moved round hell

With food offered the starved

And keeping rules gave plastic tools

So wrists could not be carved

On paper plate in greasy state

They placed it in your hand

But who could eat the Devils treat

Or who could give a damn

They thought these bars could tear souls apart

The door closed like a cave

He said "I stood like one in face of gun

With one foot in the grave

Surrounded by dirt and filth and scarred walls

His smelly tomb greeted him

He listened to his breathing and the caws of crows

Depression would be his companion again

On a mutilated filthy mattress torn to shreds by a thousand searches

He found peace in the sparrows, starlings and seagulls he watched them perching

He threw them his maggot covered bread

The screws came, the blanket men filled with dread

They raided his mom's home and smashed her Celtic harp

He said The crunch of their batons redden my hair but they can't take my heart

He said yet these flowers refuse to be broken

They made us dig out the cursed coal that's stolen

The breeze stirs the hazel tree, the water cress is red

Bloody Sunday in Derry, on a frozen floor with a swollen head

Sipping lukewarm tea and moldy bread he said our day will come

Institutionalized but never institutionalized

Institutions are lies

Pen name Marcella, his sister's name

Wrote poems on government issued toilet rolls

Kept pens inside of his body

Oh incarcerated ornithologist

I wish i could break those walls and you could fly away like a lark Death to apologists

A single ballerina flutters in the magnificence of a twilight star

The moon has come to watch the dogs howl, the vibrations bend the bars

"They have suppressed my body and attacked my dignity" I'd rather die then conform to them

But he still found poetry and music in life, the gift of a pen

He said I fought a monster today, starvation i fought a monster today

He said "I have but one weapon to overcome them: my own thoughts" today

He said "If you knew but the torture, that the prisoners know well

You'd storm these dungeons you'd tear down this hell

He went on hunger strike for 66 days

The steel gate yawned he died in H block after 66 days