Boy Soldier

What a smile! One large lamp for a face,
smaller lanterns where skin stretches over
bones waiting for muscle, body all angles.

His Kalashnikov fires at each moving
thing before he knows what he drags
down. He halts movement of every 
kind and fails to weigh whom he stops

dead or maims, his bullets
like jabs thrown before the thought 
to throw them, involuntary shudders
when someone, somewhere, steps over

his shallow, unmarked, mass grave.
But his smile remains undimmed,
inviting, not knowing what hit him,
what snuffs out the wicks in his eyes.

Except that he moves and a face just like
his figures like him to stop all action
with a flick of finger on the trigger.

Mama Dot's Treatise

Mosquitoes

Are the fattest

Inhabitants

Of this republic.

They suck our blood

From the cradle

And flaunt it

Like a fat wallet.

They form dark

Haloes; we spend

Our outdoors

Dodging sainthood.

They force us

Into an all-night

Purdah of nets

Against them.

O to stop them

Milking us

Till we are bait

For worms;

Worms that don't

Know which way

To turn and will

Inherit the earth.

Obeah Mama Dot

(her remedies)

I

I am knotted in pain.

She measures string

From navel to each nipple.

She kneads into my belly

Driving the devil

Out of my enforced fast.

II

For the fevers to subside,

I must drink the bush

Boiled to a green alluvium,

In one headlock slake;

And return to bounding around,

Side-stepping bushes for days.

III

A head-knock mushrooms

Into a bold, bald,

softened bulb.

Her poultice filled

At the end of a rainbow -

The sun above Kilimanjaro;

The murderous vial drawn,

Till the watery mound

Is a crater in burnt ground.

IV

Our rocking-chair counsellor:

Her words untangling us

from bramble and plimpler notions

Into this sudden miles-clearing.

Mama Dot

Born on a Sunday

in the kingdom of Ashante

Sold on Monday

into slavery

Ran away on Tuesday

cause she born free

Lost a foot on Wednesday

when they catch she

Worked all Thursday

till her head turned grey

Dropped on Friday

where they burned she

Freed on Saturday

in a new century

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.

So slow a fading out brings no real pain.

Breath growing short

Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain

Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see

So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls

On that small tree

And saturates your brick back garden walls,

So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends

This glistening illuminates the air. 
It never ends.

Whenever the rain comes it will be there,

Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.

Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.

What I must do Is live to see that.

That will end the game 
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,

A final flood of colors will live on

As my mind dies,

Burned by my vision of a world that shone

So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

The Last Night

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!

The beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -

Now the spoiler has come; does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works will dissolve. Meanwhile the image of pristine beauty

Lives at the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:

I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century

Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.

Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces

And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold in to itself, like fields, like snow.