written after a research visit to the Linen Hall Library with a team of researchers to examine Northern Irish civil rights activist records , Belfast, March 2025
We arrived with notebooks,
intent on tracing
the fault lines of a movement—
Northern Ireland,
one man, one vote,
the long walk toward dignity.
We did not expect
the wings.
Letters folded like birds,
aerogrammes light as breath,
creased by time,
inked with urgency,
bearing names from Accra, Cairo, Saigon, Aden—
voices that once crossed oceans
not as metaphor
but as muscle,
to say:
we see you,
we stand with you.
Outside,
the Belfast sun leans shyly through old glass.
Inside,
the dust hums like held breath.
We hold each page
as if it might vanish.
We hold it like prayer.
This is what we found.
I. Accra, 17/8/1973
To Miss Madge Davidson, Belfast, N. Ireland
Comrade Madge,
I woke up this morning feeling fine—
so I decided to write.
How is the protest?
How is the weight of it all?
Are the people still rising
with their palms open like questions?
Here, the sky hangs heavy with mango heat.
Still, I write from the edge of a fan’s breath.
The struggle for peace
must not be fenced in by borders.
It must pass like bread
from hand to hand—
from Accra to Belfast,
so all may eat justice.
They say civilisation means
glass towers, clocks, a calm voice.
But I say—civilisation is
the love of human beings.
Supreme.
Everywhere.
II. Cairo, 6/1/1973
International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions
Dear Friend,
We regret
the rise in barbaric violence
by British military forces
against Irish civilians.
In the name of ten million Arab workers,
we write
to denounce.
Because silence,
even at a distance,
still stains the hands.
We call for the soldiers’ return
to their barracks.
We call for a body
to study complaints.
We do not know your streets,
but we know what it means
to kneel beside a bloodied child
& whisper:
this country deserves
a better memory.
We affirm:
independence,
liberty,
Democracy
& dignity
for all citizens in Northern Ireland.
In Arabic,
solidarity rhymes
with tomorrow.
III. Aden, 7/3/1973
The People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf
Dear Sir,
We thank you
for your request
for a show of support.
We are sorry we could not send
a cable of solidarity
in time.
But we are sending this instead—
a letter,
folded like a promise.
Our people are fighting the enemy
of the Irish people—
British imperialism.
It is our duty
to consolidate
our struggle.
We fully support
the just rights
of the Irish people
to express & shape
their own personality.
Because even in exile,
a self must be
more than silence.
IV. Belfast, 18/9/1973
Reply to Ghana: Miss Madge Davidson
Dear Angelo,
You’re the first—
and only—person
to write to us from Africa.
Your plan to move funds
through the International Peace Front
sounds fine on paper.
But in practice,
it does not hold.
Still—
we keep going.
Any support you can send
will be put to good use.
I’ve asked Patrick
to write to you as well.
I’m enclosing information,
and hope,
in the same envelope.
Everyone here sends
their best regards,
and hope
that you are receiving
good things.
Yours in struggle,
Madge
V. Saigon, May 1973
Federation of Railway Workers, Vietnam
Some revolutions do not arrive with banners.
Sometimes they arrive with a payslip—
or the absence of one.
Our brothers worked through the monsoon,
through rust and grief,
through heat that curled steel.
And still—
no salary for 1971.
Still—
no decree of dignity.
We wrote twenty-two times
to the government of the Republic.
No reply.
So we stopped.
At 6:00 pm,
we stood still.
A silence
the world had to hear.
Because liberation can be
a work stoppage
in a city where nothing stops.
Because love is also
a ledger
where justice must balance.
VI. Belfast, 2025
Linen Hall Library, March sun
I press the aerogrammes to my chest.
They are as thin as breath.
Still, they carry continents.
In a time of hashtags and sirens,
someone once wrote—
with a biro,
and belief—
“The love of human beings should be supreme.”
I want to believe them.
Outside,
a man sleeps rough
beneath a mural.
Inside,
someone’s daughter drafts
an asylum claim
on library WiFi.
Still, the archive whispers:
liberation is not past—
but pulse.
What is a letter
if not a body
refusing to disappear?
What is a revolution
if not
a reply
still unfolding?
Image: Fiona Murphy, Amsterdam shop window, September 2025
VII. Somewhere, After the Archives
a speculative reply
Dear Comrades,
we are writing back.
It took fifty years
& a flicker of March light
in a Belfast library
to find your letters—
creased like lungs,
holding the breath
you saved for us.
We are still learning
how to hold each other
without first breaking.
We are still asking
what freedom means
when hunger is algorithmic,
when the seas are prisons,
when memory
is a luxury few can afford.
But we write to say:
your struggle
did not vanish.
It became compost—
fed our protests,
taught us to write
not to be heard
but to be held.
Angelo,
we still wake up some mornings
and write
because it’s the only way
to be free.
Madge,
the finance came,
but not in pounds.
It came in poems.
In hands held across time zones.
In tents on rain-lashed streets,
where the people still sing
of one man, one vote—
and more.
This is the song
we carry now:
not finished,
not perfect,
but loud
with all you gave us.
Yours in the beautiful,
the broken,
the becoming—
Us
The Revolution is Coming