When Sinead died
I went back
to the songs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Songs I had not heard
for years,
still carrying that voice \u2013
clear,
wounded,
unafraid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People called her
a warrior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I don\u2019t think
she wanted a fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think she simply
saw things
and could not pretend
she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lies,
the cruelty,
the things everyone agreed
not to mention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She mentioned them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And when the world
punished her for it,
she kept speaking
in that strange, fierce voice
that sounded less like anger
than pain
refusing to disguise itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that is why
she belonged so completely
to our generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were called angry too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We grew up
while certainties loosened \u2013
jobs disappeared,
families changed,
and television taught us
to distrust
our leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We learnt early
that authority
did not always deserve
the name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we questioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We rolled our eyes.
We turned the music up.
We made jokes
when perhaps
we should have cried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And somewhere between
the Boomers before us
and the generations
that came after,
we became
the ones in the middle \u2013
not asking
to be noticed,
and noticing everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps we were angry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But perhaps anger
was only the word
they gave us
for seeing the cracks
and refusing
to call the wall sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For wanting something
more honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something fairer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening to Sinead now,
knowing there will be
no more songs,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I hear that same thing \u2013
not a warrior
looking for battle,
but a human voice
trying desperately
to tell the truth
before the world
could talk over her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The death of Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor sent me back to her music. She was part of my generation \u2013 Generation X \u2013 and listening again, I found myself thinking about why we were so often described as angry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6562,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5893"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6564,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893\/revisions\/6564"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}