Freddie

During my sabbatical I am trying to make some progress on a couple of writing projects, including a series of poems prompted by places in my home city of Belfast. Many of these focus on pieces of public art. Over the weekend, after joining the large anti-racism rally at City Hall I took a detour via one of our most recently erected, and best curated statues in a seemingly unlikely corner of the city, near the junction of Lombard Street and Rosemary Street. It portrays Frederick Douglass, the black American anti-slavery campaigner, who actually was only able to buy himself out of slavery following his speaking tour of Ireland in 1845-6. As part of that he spoke in the building now known as "First Church" in Rosemary Street, which was then a politically liberal Presbyterian Church. The sculpture was created by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest and was erected in July 2023.

This piece begins with a quotation from Douglass, but whilst Saturday's anti-racism rally gives me more hope for my home city, as I post this at the beginning of Refugee Week here, I wonder whether   current migrants and refugees feel that they have a home here? 

 “Wherever else I feel myself

to be a stranger,” you said

Freddie, “I will remember

I have a home in Belfast."

I sadly wonder whether

you would still say that today,

in the wake of masked men

demanding “Foreigners out!”?

Would you face them down

as fiercely as your bronze statue

stares down this insalubrious street,

in this corner of our city centre?

Or would they happily topple you

from your plinth, as protestors

elsewhere dislodged those who

previously profited from slavery?

We once may have famously

eschewed such an odious trade,

but now far too many are enslaved

by the global market of hatred.

Your limbs are forged from bronze,

but would those with flesh to bruise,

blood to spill, bones and hearts to break,

feel quite so much at home here?

Selah