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This is a lyric I'm still working on.

It's about growing up in a war zone, when crazy things explode around you and you just have to cope. I was 9 when the Northern Ireland troubles exploded - and 34 when the ceasefires came - and we're still working on it - the peace that is.

Brand New Pin

How'd you like to start again,
Brand new pin in a baby pen
Looking through the bars out at the world?

Ready again to face the sun.
Ready and steady with races to run
Like this here life had never ever been.

Well you contradicted me,
Told me it could never be
That that little kid would be somebody else.

You said something about nature nurture,
My past wouldn't be their future,
Because of all the things that come by chance.

Well, what if it could be they knew
Every single thing I knew,
All the way back to the very start?

You said that for all I'd try,
That child would be sure to cry
At diff'rent things, at diff'rent times than I.

It wouldn't ever know my mother,
Or grow tall with my sister 'n' brother,
Wouldn't know the bombing and the pain.

And that one brought me to a shuddering halt,
Thinking 'bout the horrors that weren't my fault.
No child ought to grow the way I grew.

Soldiers on the streets, searches and car blasts,
The painful  pictures locked up in my past.
All the anger at the men who stole my youth.

Who would wish that a child might live,
Learn to hate and never forgive,
Or shut their wounded heart in a bitter chest.

So the kid in the pen will be set free.
Ill content with the hours in front of me,
Thanks to the therapy session on your couch.

OK - This is the song version of a poem / lyrics I posted on inauguration day. Since my last song post, I've been figuring out all that recording stuff and have finally bought a mic, so you can expect some really bad recordings sometime in the next 50 years or so - doesn't work get in the way of your real life!

Again, I've posted it in C, though I can only sing in Eb and F.

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I'm sitting in a hotel in London, after a long day of meetings, and this lyric pops into the world.

It's in in the tradition of a lot of Irish songs - so many friends and family left never to return.

Some words need translation - whin ( pronounced h-win ) is a gorse bush, a buck is a young man, and a blade a young woman. The places are all real, all around Cushendall on the Antrim Coast. I'll work on the melody when I get home.

"Mary Anne's Grave.

High on the Hillside,
In a cleft in the cliff wall
The old Church communes
With the South coast of Mull.
And I walked you there often
Along the cliff path
where the stark head of Garron
shelters Glenariffe.

It's there that I led you,
And there that we lay
Across Mary-Anne's gravestone
And consecrated the day.
But youth and all its vigour,
Would brook no return
To the moss and yellow lichen
on Mary-Anne's tomb.

We traveled and I held you
Close all those years
While the little Church at Layde
Stood proud among the trees.
But time it gets the better of us,
Despite what we try.
There are hospitals and sea cures,
But in the end we all die

Now I rolled my wheelchair
Down to Layde Church
Where the green of the sea
and the whin bushes merge
And startled a buck
To rise from his blade
Just as I did from you girl
When our bed we first made.

So I'll sit in McConnell's
In the back kitchen bar
And sing there with old friends
And remember the hours
that we dreamed of returning
To Ireland to stay
and visit that churchyard
And Mary-Anne's grave."