Wards of Purgatory

The dead of the clans are mute on the streets of the Ward
where they died and go unremembered except in whispers.
The cracks they've created between past and present have become
the haunts they use to make their forays among the descendants
of those who killed them, but shorn of history, deprived of
justice, and made even more insubstantial because their own
kin seldom speak for them, they waste, torn by time in passing.

And where the Ward once thrived, vital with neighbours of
Calabrian descent side by each with Slavs, and Jews and Irish
and blacks, the crack dealers now house themselves where those families
came of age. And new homes full of new lives established within
the old walls built by those unrelated to the past, still cannot escape
the ghost town feel of the streets. Mistrust gutters along
the curb sides and huddles in shadows. The old homes crumble for some
were never well built, but rather rose to shelter extending lines
that made their gradual way out of the Ward altogether,
leaving only the dead and the shambles behind.

Still owned by the heirs of cobblers and grocers and bakers and
workmen and housewives and seamstresses and hair stylists and
grill cooks and mechanics made good, and by mobsters, the homes have
lost their way, for the ghosts of those murdered in time and
forgotten by choice haunt the new poverty and coats
the neighbourhood like decay.

But the truth won't be told because those who could tell it
refuse to acknowledge it, instead they protest that those who
do defend the dead tell lies and half truths, for they would rather
live among their new new neighbours like pillars, only their pedestals
are sand and their mortar is dust. Their 'Sunday best' are rags of veneer,
their place in society was achieved through vendetta and is
sustained by misery.

Their businesses
clean monies made by those who deal
weapons for drugs and who breed despair amongst the poorest
of the world; they breed the need for petty theft, they breed
prostitutes and death. But the dead remember, for they are purgatorial,
witnesses to the hypocrisy of the living, and they will not
forget, and they cannot entirely fade, for they are damned
to the state they're in by the silence of their enemies
and by that of their loved ones. They must await the End for rest,
for they were not innocent in life either. They will not be
redeemed before the End, and never by silent prayer, unless
there are vigils held in their cause
and their names are read in the streets
and the causes of their deaths are recounted
by priests throughout St Patrick's Ward.
Only then might they rest.