Another Good Friday by Maria McManus

I hardly know where or how to begin. I feel waves of grief for the family and partner of Lyra McKee  and for all of us, after her murder. Here we are, twenty-one Good Fridays after our peace agreement and we wake to the news of another life lost. Lyra McKee,  was doing her job as a journalist and was shot dead by Republican terrorists in Derry. Some coward in the night stepped out of the shadows with a gun and shot. She is dead.

My generation inherited The Troubles, but we have failed to finish them, to deal with them so definitively that we can instead focus, fully and constructively, on creating a life-affirming future. The future will happen anyway; it will come as time comes, second by second.  So what now? How will we make it better?

I wrote  this poem for TURF, a dance theatre piece I…