Orange Song
By Fleur Adcock
You with your orange hair
breaking into “The Sash”
as we pranced from supermarket to bar
that warm day in Coleraine.
And us shouting you down-
you with all your talk of truce
and not even Irish.
But we laughed as you whistled on;
I let my arm stay in yours.
Well, it was a good tune-
and weren’t you really a man of peace?
Were you? I look at my scars.
From Ambit magazine issue 65, 1976