Write whatever you like!
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.