Mr. Heaney

by T.S. Kerrigan

How delightful to meet your man Heaney!

He’s an elegant choice for a reading.
He’s conversant with frogs
And knows all about bogs,
Representing the best culchie breeding

Such an erudite man, Mr. Heaney.
While he’s swilling poteen,
With barmbrack in between,
You can hear in the background Puccini.

He’s charisma itself, your man Heaney,
But for thatch in his hair,
He’d be quite debonair
Like his hero, the charming Mad Sweeney.

How delightful to meet your man Heaney!

Previously published in The Barefoot Muse, Summer 2007

14
March, 2011

The second son of a postman, T.S. Kerrigan grew up in Los Angeles, Brecht and others’ vision of hell, from whence he has never been able to escape. He attended the University of California and Loyola University School of Law. At the end of a long legal trial and appelllate career, he argued successfully in the United States Supreme Court to preserve a statute enacted during the Great Depression to protect workers. He was invited to read his poems at Poetry on the Lake in the Italian Alps in 2009 (http://www.poetryonthelake.org/). His latest and largest collection is My Dark People (Central Avenue Press, 2008) which, Lewis Turco claims in a recent review in The Hollins Critic, contains poems that rival A.D. Hope’s.

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