I hope I’ll never have to suffer
the pain of being grand.
I mean of being really grand,
not that grand we say we are
when we mean we’re really not,
and then others agree they too are grand
when they are so far from it.
I imagine famished bodies
in the wasteland bogs of Ireland
back in 1845
telling one another how grand they are,
one-upping each other
any way they can
on that then and still not yet calibrated
scale of grandness
Irish people seem to feel innately in their blood
and bones.
And if you were even to ask Irish history
how it is, don’t you know
you’d be told grand,
and you should also know
that the same history’s grandness
gave you the grandness
you express today and every day,
but there is that understanding
between you that grand doesn’t really exist
and never will in an Irish future,
and in a way that’s, as you say, grand,
because you’d never want it to,
the idea is so frightening
and ghostly.
And were we ever grand,
and again, of course, I mean really grand,
we’d probably never
get over it;
telling each other we’re grand
and meaning exactly that.