SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Terry Ward (1910- 1970)

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20th Century Ireland - Terry Ward (1910- 1970)

Terry Ward, the maternal uncle of Seamus Keenan, was born and educated in Derry. He was imprisoned for republican activities during the Irish Civil War afterwhich he became assistant editor of the Sinn Féin newspaper An Phoblacht. He later joined the staff of The Irish Press. Ward's poem Kevin Barry is about an eighteen year old IRA Volunteer who was cruelly treated in prison before being executed by hanging in Mountjoy Gaol, Dublin on November 20th, 1920. Kevin Barry became a national folk-hero and is remembered in poetry and song in Ireland to this day.©

Kevin Barry
I cannot forget
The sight of that straight young neck
In the clasp of the hempen rope
That day in November.

And I see always
The minions of the Saxon foe,
And hear the wailing of the women
That day in November.

I think of his youth
And the years that beckoned him on,
And he dying in the grey shadows
That day in November.

Where was our manhood,
O sons of the sorrowful Queen,
To let the brutal foreman triumph undisturbed
That day in November?

Have you sworn deeply
That the day of reckoning is near,
For the evil crew who murdered Kevin Barry
That day in November?

© Searc's Web Guide 1997-2007

20th Century Ireland (1917-1923)
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