Poem

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 —

when life says shut
the most you could muster
moments on a lake
pooled passive
or close enough and whispering
the past and only glory

Down sandstone steps to the jetty; always
the same water, lights scattered across the tide.
Remember we say, the first time.
Our eyes locked into endless permission;

this dark gift; why can’t I let go
and be the man in your life, not the one who writes
your name down for the dedication page;
whatever the name, you know who I write for;