Off by Heart

OFF BY HEART 

Thanks to you 

my fat-knuckled 

trigger-fisted 

master 

At the fine 

young age  

of eight 

I did discover 

How the strong 

aim the weak 

against the weaker. 

My crime? 

To miss my nine times tables. 

My punishment:  

to sit beside ‘the tinker.’ 

 ********

I wrote this when I was 16. It refers to one of the many forms of sadistic abuse practiced by the majority of teachers in Clonakilty Boys National School in the 1980s on the children in their ‘care’. Children from the Travelling Community were particularly badly abused and, as a consequence, several were broken and died young.