Milk

  I

Three men

On a morning in early summer

Tipped a lorryload of poisoned whey

Into the Line river.

The water opened

And gulped it down.

It was a white poison.

The river swelled with the

Evil milk.

A snowy vein of death

Piercing the land's body.

All through the land

Seeped the scum in a murderous rut,

Through fields and

Meadows waiting to be cut,

Past villages and townlands

Into the sea.

  II

Everything died in the milky river.

Brown trout, eels, fluke, young salmon

Perished, every one.

White bellies to the light

Fish floated down the river

Corpses jostling in the tide.

In the summer morning

Poison entered the sun,

Riddled the light

On land and sea,

Possessed the invisible stars

Turned to dust in the air

Dropped like a gentle malignant shiver of snow

Into the hearts of three men

Standing on a bank

Of the Line river.

  III

Men working in the fields

Saw white bellies of fish.

Pain jabbed at the hearts of some.

They waded in as far as they could go

Collected the bodies in bags

Returned to the banks

Spread the fish in the fields –

Row after glittering row.

Strange to see

Fishbodies

In the rivery grass,

Men bending over them

Incomprehension in their eyes.

Looking back at the river

They saw countless trout

Try to leap from the water

As if wanting to be alone,

Preferring to die

In an alien environment

Than in their poisoned own.

A few fish reached the grass, gravel, stones

The air pressing on every side.

They stirred, leaped, flickered in the sun

And died.

  IV

Milk of peace, milk of human kindness, sign of the fish –

The fields were strewn with dead metaphors.

Language had fought a pitched battle and lost

And now the choicest of its soldiers

Lay corpsed in the sun,

Their hearts yanked out and flung at random on the grass.

What grass would grow from these abandoned hearts

Would be sour as the words of a man

Whose days were black pits

Of disappointment.

Light that might have been a light of love

Circled like a bird of prey

Above the fields

Where nothing could be done or said

To halt the carrion light

From ravaging the dead.

  V

The men who poisoned the river

Seemed hardly to know what was done.

Would they know what they did

If they poisoned the sun?

When they dumped death into the water

What did they do or say?

They turned their backs on a job well-done

And walked away.

  VI

Later,

People walking through or near the fields

Were forced to drink the stench.

Implacable as cancer

It pierced their clothes and skin

Lived there

White and vile as leprosy.

The whiter, the viler.

It seemed to many women and men

That God’s air

Would never be clean again.

  VII

In time

Fishbodies would be clay and grass,

Pain in the men’s eyes

Lessen

But the river will never

Recover

Its own creatures rotting in light.

The river

And the land it flows for

Will never forget

The summer of poisoned white.