Poems
The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine
In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.
... (read more)There is no God, I was made in this man’s image:
those slate-dark eyes of his are mine,
the dented bridge of our his-my nose.
I laugh with his rasping cackle in me.
I walk with his stooping, trudging gait,
swearing his ‘Jesus bloody Christ’
in a sudden fist-curl of temper.
My right ear points like a flesh-antenna as his does,
and being my father I bear his name.
Haphazardries of kin passed on from birth
that to see him wizened on his cancer bed,
his insides turned to water,
... (read more)for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’
Douglas Dunn
To the sea we bear our fathers in state –
or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.
Surf mild as receding tides,
we slump in dunes with our burdens,
... (read more)This must be a page from The Manual
For the Instructing of Humanity,
Showing the improvement of the Social Order
By the avoidance of personal identification
With Suffering, a turning-away to private Sanity.
... (read more)The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher
who begets the rainbow bee-eater
who begets the firetailed finch
who begets the forty-spotted pardalote
who begets the damsel fly
who begets the jewelled beetle
who begets a pentangle of reflected light
that falls on a colony of dust mites
... (read more)(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)
Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.
Nobody answers him.
She’s got dark hair that stops
just above her shoulders. Turns up at the ends.
She’s very slim, Max says.
He’s talking to Hamid
about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,
whom he is hoping to meet
somewhere south of Baghdad.
... (read more)High, bright winter’s morning: the tenements’ bare tree-antlers clattering
on each corner and the stepping black spines smooth and glossy
as mirages; framed, the scene shines as if transported to a desert, and never
... (read more)Ter Borch would know him, this latter-day companion
of the cavalryman bowed on his mount,
shoulders and haunches sapped with exhaustion: and Sherman,
bright-eyed, red-handed, a hellion to order:
and the mailed believers of Krak.
The music stopped
This had been expected.
Paintings were stilled
And books lay mute.
... (read more)