No satchel – no books
The little boy walks home from school
Commercial trading hurrying passers by
Distant winds wiping their mouths on flapping bits of rags
Fast road river obedient and disobedient
Sale music snatches
The little boy walks along the ritual path on which since early times the laws
have carried out their blood-lustrations of revenge
Immured in the empty crowd
He does not kneel – weep – cry out – clutch at passing coats
No satchel – no books
From a great distance the invisible hand stretches to drag the tide
over the ancient shore
Seaweed black wrack – dead serpents’ knotted skins
Tonight again they will nail him flesh to bone
Evening newspapers stacked on the kerb – freebies
A traffic warden with toothache
Hammer
Her earrings tinkle
An hour passes – hammer again
The evil bijouterie of time in the flesh-carpenter’s house
No hurry – not hesitate – no turn aside to leave the path –
walk at the path’s pace
No satchel – no books
Two corners – door
His shadow passes through the springs and cogs of the shadow clockwork
A corner
A surge of light and grey – Attic attire – flurrying startled pigeons
Rows of windows – trade-signature embossed glazed bricks
Corner
Path end
I wait on the doorstep
He shall not enter the house alone
He shall not
I take his hand
And lead him to his murderers
Am I happy?
The happy do not ask themselves this question
I ask myself can you be happy in a world choked with madness and violence
to its horizons?
I am happy – I always have been since I was a child
I was happy when bombs howling like people in panic fell on the street
in which I was born
And when teachers as brittle and white as fossil chalk taught me I was stupid
And when one morning in the street suddenly out of nowhere I understood
I had been born into a class to live and work – to be and die – as second class
And in the years of labouring for a living wage – tedium is a slow mortal disease
And when I dug the bayonet into the fluttering entrails of the pasteboard man
and screamed his last imprecations from his paper mouth
And when I knew the cruelty of scaffolds sonderlager sites of massacres
and the little empty rooms where windows wept into their curtains
And when I turned the handle of a door and the house turned round –
malice and envy were waiting in bodies crouched inside themselves
And when the cradle of my craft was hired out to be a squat for gaudy tawdry
prestidigitators to prance and do their business in
And even when she-and-he sold to fellow racketeers for cash
the public patrimony that soldiers in world wars
had purchased with their blood to be the common good
I was happy – because I could write
I wrote of what I saw and heard and knew so that it shall be remembered
And if one day I stand on the slope where men destroy men in one last
abomination -- a cruelty of mind or body so violent that all other men -their wives and children -- are marked with its blood
I shall be happy
Beyond that slope will be a beach where I shall sit and with my finger
write in the gravel
December 2013