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Tuesday, May 22nd 2012


Sacrifice

Sacrifice

I’d be a bit more cautious about that aspect of how

I conduct my social life.” Brian Cowen

Though the world no longer permits,

for the King’s pleasure,

the Saturday night offering up

of girls on the altar at the Acropolis;

on a good day we’d allow you

anything short of being found on top

of a live boy or a dead woman.


When they come for you

the charge sheet won’t mention

the songs you sang in Galway,

nor the morning phlegm

we suffer from ourselves.

You won’t go to the gallows

for the crime of your uncleared throat,

but the shopping mall abandoned

two years ago with only

the underground car park completed;

its billboards still beam down

the future that will never be. For all

the palaces and pyramids built

with gold that didn’t exist.

For the less we have

to look forward to, you’re

the necessary sacrifice

these challenging times

demand.

The wind testing the September trees

as you’re driven down Taylor’s Hill

next morning

is your hangman whistling

before he knocks.

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway, Ireland.  He facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. His first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009. His work also features in the anthology Identity Parade - New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010). Frightening New Furniture is his third collection of poems and was published in April by Salmon Poetry.

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  1. Comment by: William Wall

    Sep 23rd 2010 at 14:09

    With respect the media are getting into word games here and it’s important that we avoid them. What we’re talking about is dealing with the EU plans we have to cut our deficits in line with what we’ve said and as Brian Lenihan has been saying the minimum of what we’re talking about is €3 billion.

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