‘An Exoneration of Innocents’
© Joe Canning 2018. All Rights Reserved.
It was a moment that rewarded patience.
A small man of poetry, a President;
Respectful to his country’s victims.
Scathing he, of the wrongs of zealots.
When from a lectern, almost as tall,
Addressed a room of baited hearts.
Once hard hands now softened by time; wrung.
Hands still reeking of psychological carbolic; but
This time the wringing was not of pillows, shirts or sheets.
Exoneration was the order of the day.
The lambasting of criminals, justified.
Condemnation of those that remained silent.
Collaborators.
Scars and stains he removed from innocents,
Destruction of self doubting, a banishing of self blaming,
Easing of tortured minds, albeit too late for some.
I watched, listened, waiting for waffling,
The critic in me was destroyed.
In that address, an apology, honesty, acceptance.
The steaming hell holes are gone now.
Gone too the cruel governments of abettance,
The tall adorned Mitres disgraced and humiliated.
The ‘Hothouse Flowers’ sang when the truth was told.
Entertained them, they smiled in their liberation.
And so, freed from stain were the real Hothouse Flowers.
The slaves of the Magdalene monsters.
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