70-YEAR-OLD Stockmans man Paul Kennedy has been writing poetry for decades and has had a number of his pieces published in anthologies.

With current war in Ukraine, his latest poem is a poignant reminder of earlier events in eastern Europe and harks back at the Holocaust of the 1940s. Discussing how he started writing, Paul told the Andersonstown News that he had been working in Shorts at the time and wrote a piece about some broken doors in the plant.
 
“I was never interested in English or poetry,” he said. “I was working in Shorts and the automatic doors always opened when they shouldn’t have, then they wouldn’t close.
 
“No sooner were they fixed when they were broke again and one of my mates said to me that I should write a story about it because I was always telling yarns and jokes.
 
“I got a bit of paper on my lunch hour and wrote a wee piece. Larry Grayson’s catchphrase was always ‘shut that door’ so I started to write the poem around that.”
  
“When I wrote the poem about the doors, some of the fellas in Shorts told me that I should try and get it published. One of the fellas said I never would so I kept it up to prove him wrong.”
 
Paul told us that he was not an avid reader of books and lost interest in school after being hit by a teacher for forgetting to learn his prayers. However, he said that he enjoys reading articles online.
 
“Recently I was reading an article on Ukriane and what is happening in Hungary with Viktor Orbán. It mentioned this sculpture of shoes on the Danube river bank. I had never heard about it before so I began to research it and that inspired my latest poem.
 
“It was just terrible. I have read stuff before about what happened to the Jews. I don’t know why, but I just felt some connection with this story and had to write a poem to process it.”

Sixty Pair of Shoes by Paul Kennedy

Sixty pair of shoes
Innocent lives lost;
All because they were Jews;
A jigsaw piece of the Holocaust.
 
Barefooted on the Danube bank
Backward falling to the cemetery of red;
No sign of rescue, their bodies sank;
Taken down to the river bed.
 
Regardless of age, they knew their fate;
Never again will they stand alone;
Courts and politicians will forever debate;
The ethnic cleansing we can’t condone.
 
All that is left is iron footwear;
A memorial of our shameful past;
Boots, shoes and sandals all left bare;
What a shadow this has cast.