Friday, May 20, 2016

For Laura Kuenssberg: A poem by Kevin Higgins


Kevin Higgins
Laura Kuenssberg is the BBC’s political editor. She was appointed in 2015 and is relentlessly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor Party in general. She has, “displayed a level of bias against Labour in recent months, and certainly her attacks on Corbyn's leadership have been verging on hysterical….” Writes Huff Post UK’s Political blogger Ian Middleton. She is from the middle and upper middle class and her maternal grandfather, Lord Robertson was a high court judge. Her great uncle was the last British Colonial Governor of Nigeria. It’s somewhat Ironic, a pure bred pedigree like Kuenssberg joining the BBC, a news outlet referred to in some US circles during the war in Iraq as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.

Ireland's Kevin Higgins has devoted a few lines to this daughter of the British upper crust.


Inheritor
for Laura Kuenssberg, BBC political editor

Civilisation sometimes means
rubbing hot peppers in the murderous
eyeballs of teenage internees, or
regretfully introducing their bare backs
to whips embedded with bits of iron.

A chap aiming his rifle
at unarmed Punjabees
until the ammunition runs out
is understandable in the context
of it having been a Saturday.
Those women and small ones
who drowned hiding down a well
would’ve eventually died anyway.

Sometimes a fellow,
during the course of one
excellent lunch, has to partition
India. You cannot know
what that’s like until such responsibility
has been laid out on the table in front of you.

In the opinion of many,
giving handouts to the starving
would’ve made the potato famine
worse, made them come back
asking for more.

When no alternative presents itself,
making detainees sit naked on a metal pole
is understandable in the context
of it being then and them being brown.

When thoughts such as these
take root and royally flower,
words will wing out of her mouth –
chattering parakeets disguised as exquisite owls –

she will tell you, and you will know,
why those born to rule must do
what rulers must.

KEVIN HIGGINS

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant poetry.