Loading...
Hotel Emergencies
Hotel Emergencies
The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given...
Letter to a City Under Siege
Letter to a City Under Siege
Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city,
reading the Braille of its walls, walking beneath ghost branches
of chestnuts, fires that turn...
Handbag
My mother's old leather handbag,
crowded with letters she carried
all through the war. The smell
of my mother's handbag: mints
and lipstick and Coty powder.
The look of those letters,...
At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux
I walked where in their talking graves
And shirts of earth five thousand lay,
When history with ten feasts of fire
Had eaten the red air away.
'I am Christ's boy,' I cried. 'I bear
In iron...
Cameo Appearance
Cameo Appearance
I had a small, nonspeaking part
In a bloody epic. I was one of the
Bombed and fleeing humanity.
In the distance the great leader
Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,...
Wind
This is the wind, the wind in a field of corn.
Great crowds are fleeing from a major disaster
Down the long valleys, the green swaying wadis,
Down through the beautiful catastrophe of wind.
...
Walking Wounded
A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.
In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;
The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane
Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,
Their...
Mametz Wood
For years afterwards the farmers found them -
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,...
Five Ways to Kill a Man
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:
you can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a...
Escape Journey, 1988
Escape Journey, 1988
They force you to crawl, these mountains,
even if you are only 14.
Who made their first journey over them?
Whose feet created this track?
The exhausted mules carry...
Anne Frank Huis
Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow...
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on- on- and out of...
Life Is a Walk Across a Field
Life is a Walk Across a Field
This is the opposite of the Russian proverb, Life is not a walk across a field, which is the last line of Boris Pasternak's poem Hamlet.
Life is a walk across a field
...
Coming Home
The son they love came home then went away.
They asked him why he cried out every night.
He didn't tell them and he couldn't stay.
They try to reach him but he'll never write.
They lie togther...
Enemies
Enemies
I do not know who my enemies are.
Is he Shrap Nel. He is sharp
and he bites me. It was he
who opened the door to Menin
Gococci. You can see him
under a microscope, if you care...
Playground
Playground
dark brown eyes
scanning dusty tarmac
a boy on a swing
head down
mouth humming
a boy swinging intensely
before dusk he must go
to his...
