A Poem for the Parliamentary Labor Party

Kevin Higgins

Olive Branch: On the Divine
Right of Honourable Members

for the Parliamentary Labour Party

Hardly any of us wish you dead.
The decapitation machine is mostly metaphorical.
We have no immediate plans to place
your severed heads — eyes and tongues protruding wildly —
in a line along the railings outside Westminster
or leave them there for the next
twenty years, as a warning to others.

It’s just we think many of you would benefit
from six months working part time
minimum wage in a home for cancer
patients who refuse to wear pants;

a year or two of Sunday
mornings scrubbing clean the back seats
of the inferior sort of taxi
hoping you’ll eventually be taken on
another day a week;

or five years carting what appear to you to be
the same set of boxes round and round a warehouse
in one of the less cosmopolitan bits of Walsall,
working a guaranteed minimum of no hours a fortnight;

to help you adjust to the new
undeniable: after years when — in your
Alexandra Wood supreme bespoke suit —
you ruled;

you’re no longer even on the committee
organising your own destiny.

By Kevin Higgins