SUMMERS OF VIOLENCE
He came in winter, buzzing by the stove.
She fed him crumbs and butter. She was very
lonely. She liked his talk of summer,
grew perceptive as a fly. But in June,
when she still saw nothing, she squeezed her fist
and heard him scream. “I am the universal
suffering man, a sacrifice in
an empty room, reduced to a shadow
on a public wall, tearing my way
to the top in the bathhouse.” She called him
Gabriel. The night she was born bombs blitzed seeds
in her brain, a wild garden that flowered
in summers of violence.
WE PRISONERS
A lark starting from the heather; a lamb
amazed by a heron; a hare gutted
at a turn in the road; the familiar path
obscured by fern, bramble, convolvulus:
the gallery in my head is open
all hours – by turns, thriving and derelict.
The sparrow in my chest, where my heart lay,
now flings itself at broken panes, now stills.
At the end of the pier, where steamships docked,
black-headed gulls and anglers watch and wait.
The steel-faced laughing man will read our stars.
Under the planking, the jelly fish glide.
My heart is a fist clenched in darkness,
a sea-anemone in coral waters.