Rita Ann Higgins

Rita Ann Higgins Poems

Rita Ann Higgins Biography

Rita Ann Higgins, born in Galway in 1955, has published numerous volumes of poetry, as well as several plays. One of 11 children, Higgins left school at 14 and first began to be interested in writing during a long stay in hospital in her 20s. In an interview she described her decision to become a poet with a typical lack of pretension: 'You didn’t have to worry about tenses and verbs. You could write a poem without a verb, and if you didn’t know what a verb was – and I didn’t – it was ok.' Her poems, similarly ironic in tone, have been awarded numerous prizes.)

The Best Poem Of Rita Ann Higgins

The Did-You-Come-Yets of the Western World

When he says to you:
You look so beautiful
you smell so nice -
how I've missed you -
and did you come yet?

It means nothing,
and he is smaller
than a mouse's fart.

Don't listen to him...
Go to Annaghdown Pier
with your father's rod.
Don't necessarily hold out
for the biggest one;
oftentimes the biggest ones
are the smallest in the end.

Bring them all home,
but not together.
One by one is the trick;
avoid red herrings and scandal.

Maybe you could take two
on the shortest day of the year.
Time is the cheater here
not you, so don't worry.

Many will bite the usual bait;
they will talk their slippery way
through fine clothes and expensive perfume,
fishing up your independence.

These are
the did-you-come-yets of the western world,
the feather and fin rufflers.
Pity for them they have no wisdom.

Others will bite at any bait.
Maggot, suspender, or dead worm.
Throw them to the sharks.

In time one will crawl
out from under thigh-land.
Although drowning he will say,
‘Woman I am terrified, why is this house
shaking?

And you'll know he's the one.

Rita Ann Higgins Comments