An Irishman In Manchester The Night The Queen Died
Jones Irwin, Republic of Ireland
14 november 2025
Irish Blood, English Heart, this I’m made of
There is no one on Earth I am afraid of
Morrissey
Innocent your honour I wasn’t
even close when the Queen passed
if yes on the same land mass this
evening at Piccadilly Station there is
a kind of hush truth be told even Sinn
Féin liked her in inverse to the disrespect
for the new King but tonight is about marking
a loss which even us Irish Leftists realise so let’s
say down with monarchy and up with good old Liz
who’s worth a pint of Punk IPA on Oldham
Street in the Northern Quarter. Sláinte.
Note on “Some Poems from the Passionate Margins of the Alt-Left”
If these poems are political (defiantly they are!), then they don’t sit comfortably for me within any doctrinal or dogmatic ideology. At the same time, they derive their anger and their energy from a passion which is rooted in a recognition of historical and contemporary injustice (whether subtle or more painfully searing), but which also looks to the courage of those prepared to stand up strongly against such degrading forms of oppression. Now and again, these short texts choose to laugh with or at such difficult experiences, also with some self-mocking (as we say in Dublin on the banks of the Liffey, ‘sláinte’). Whether one might say Marxist or Anarchist (or sometimes both), ultimately they conjoin in an ethos from Handsworth’s (neo-Caribbean) Steel Pulse; love thy neighbour. Ah, go on!
An Irishman in Manchester the Night the Queen Died is part of the “Some Poems from the Passionate Margins of the Alt-Left” Series that will be published over the next months.