LAST EDITED ON Jun-19-04 AT 09:15 AM
(PST)
"The Northern Ireland Question" is a very short (4 lines) poem, which
described two innocent girls playing tig(game)near a car in the first
two lines.
The last two lines, or all of the rest of the poem, asked the
important "The Northern Ireland Question" - "how many counties would you
say are worth their scattered fingers?" (444)
This is not a question that expected an answer, because there oughts
to have no answers. No one wants to kill two innocent girls like those
in the poem, but the poem also suggested that there are people who are
planning to do such thing. If there are someone who planned to place a
bomb (probably under the car), that situation must either be a terrorism
or a war.
I agree with yu-ching, but I disagree with Jennifer. I don't think it
has to do with the tig in the poem. The tig is just a game that tells us
those two wee (little) girls were having fun. I believe, as yu-ching
mentioned, it is the bomb that is not mentioned in the poem that makes
the car dangerous. At the end of the second line, there are three dots
("...", page 444) after the word "car"(444). This suggested the car has
something "funny" about it, probably the car has a deadly bomb
underneath it.