Poetry by Dave Lordan The only Hero in Town For some time I’ve been wishing you did not exist that I’d invented you that you’d never barged through our classroom door with your fists clenched and your heart on fire roaring for our tyrant’s blood. I have wished you and wished you and wished you again out of my memory out of my existence out of my poetry so that I wouldn’t be scalded so often by this unbearable, unnatural shame at my own this unbearable insoluble shame at the contrast twixt you (lanky & pale & half-a-brit & only a blow-in) and all those other red-faced men, all those local, rebel-county men, fatly descended from Heros victorious, who did not heroically storm into our classroom in 1983 half-an-hour after their sons were bloody beaten and lift the master by the neck & pin him to the blackboard and make him cry & beg as he made children cry & beg until he’d cursed their life for good so that some of them lie now forever-teen or twenty-something in the same row in the graveyard as you who died in my eyes & in the eyes of poetry died guiltless and shining and old-heroic at your appointed time, no earlier… Dave Lordan is an Irish poet and a surviving survivor of, and continuing witness to child abuse in the Irish primary education system in the 1980s. Read a selection of his poetry here.