Poems

He sang of old coins buried beneath the dunes,
to the north of the island, near the old artillery battery.
For forty years he rowed for mullet north, and south,
where the war epic motion picture was shot recently.

To the north of the island, near the old artillery battery
we played hide and seek as kids in acres of bladey-grass.
Where the war epic motion picture was shot recently
no one was allowed within a thousand metres.

Then, there were spires in every landscape
Tall, tapering fingers pressed together,
The supplications of early sainthood –

Those that the early painters made
To teach the unlettered, while the spires
Called them to listen and to pray.

A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations

      jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow

my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened

     as I am not by a lost country.

He meets a man with an icicle voice

who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’

to act impulsively; this man elevates

‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships

at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar

(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,

at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –

which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed

pickled brain, in a jar).

Today in Castlereagh Street I
Felt short of breath, and here is why.

Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter —