‘It Was For This’ by Kevin Higgins

It Was For This     That Queen Maeve prepared for battle by angrily shaving her armpits with a razor   improvised from north Fermanagh shale. For this W.B. Yeats took all that   experimental Viagra, and waited for the consequences to grow. For this   Archbishop McQuaid rolled naked through fields of Lavender.   For this Maude Gonne let slip from her womb a future   Minister for External Affairs, while loudly denying   the Holocaust in Irish. For this Oliver J. Flanagan warned us:   “where the bees are there is the honey, and where the Jews are there is the money”   For this latter day Druids moved to Ballyvaughan or west Cork,   and began accepting payment by PayPal. For this Fiachra of the fashionable whiskers   took his herbal tincture and sat letting silence surround him   for the twenty four hours his homeopath recommended. For this   genuine girls all over Ireland are waiting for your call   after you stop shouting at the terrible news. For this   you paid the phone bill though it left your bank account burnt   as a cottage visited once too often by the black and tans. For this   on wild Atlantic nights – the lines down and the cattle crying   in the fields, you keep trying to get through – though you’re pretty sure   some of those girls aren’t genuinely girls. For this Eoin O’Duffy   put all his bulls in the one field and dreamed of one day   holding in this hand Heinrich Himmler’s mickey. For this   Sean O’Casey broke the window to let the winter in   and wrote letters backing the Hitler-Stalin pact. For this   Dr Maureen Gaffney of Trinity College went on the radio every Saturday   to express concern about poverty, and people phoned in to agree.   For this the people of Roscommon drank from their toilets, and threw up   thankful prayers to the monks at Glenstal Abbey. For this   you voted to keep the black babies out a sensible policy for a cleaner Glenamaddy, Hacketstown, Portlaoise… For this the bus driver didn’t stop just now   when he saw you waving.   All that history  so you can stumble up the steps, sweat gushing from your armpits, late   for that crucial interview; or arrive at the hospital ten minutes after  they’ve switched off the respirator and folded the sheet white   over your father’s face. It was all for this.   © KEVIN HIGGINS Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway City. He has published four collections of poems: Kevin’s most recent collection of poetry, The Ghost In The Lobby, was launched at this year’s Cúirt Festival by Mick Wallace TD. His poems also features in the anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and one of his poems is included in the anthology The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). His poetry was recently the subject of a paper titled ‘The Case of Kevin Higgins: Or The Present State of Irish Poetic Satire’ given by David Wheatley at a symposium on satire at the University of Aberdeen; David Wheatley’s paper can be read in full here http://georgiasam.blogspot.ie/2014/05/the-case-of-kevin-higgins-or-present.html . Mentioning The War, a collection of his essays and reviews, was published by Salmon in April, 2012. Kevin’s blog is http://mentioningthewar.blogspot.ie/ . and has been described by Dave Lordan as “one of the funniest around” who has also called Kevin “Ireland’s sharpest satirist.” . Kevin Higgins will be taking part in the Lingo Festival this coming Saturday.