The milk tastes off in wartime Clammy on the tongue Even when you are so distant You can hardly hear the metal bend You make galaktoboureko So thick the shape returns Wondering why Easter Falls in archaic calendars Each year on new days As if martyrdom were inexact in its demands I imagine Medea’s tears In thick and sweet and distilled stains When she learned she ate her young Time Is a wolf, you say And in one deft hand Break another egg
Tag: War
This poem is a war crime
The prisoners have butterflies for mouths Teeth bared like burnt-out buildings They say exactly what we want – without undue coercion Just the slightest quaver Of the jaw and throat Where stubble hides the muzzled bruises We lied, we are wrong We came to drink your blood These are eyes not camouflage In haloes on our wings Here the children have hands of bone Bandannas over nose and mouth In the stench they forgot somehow to sing The sun is bright in vain Inviolate on the mountainside The studio has that flicker scent Of blitzkrieg and cigars when you are almost halfway up Back arched in trapezoid envy The sky is less steady than it seems Icarine- the too harsh blue Of interrupted broadcasts Looking up, we make new stars Name them in bravado See the smithereens Cascade in new intaglios On the surface of the eye Blink the warmth of tears Gravity has an equivocal grip When you are almost halfway down Knuckles raw as dinosaurs Feet arched in Quetzalcoatl torsions Sending hubris, sending love We will solve this war Like a misheard refrain That thick comforting savour Of something on the stove Notes played and played and played again Til, despite what we have heard What we hear is right What we hear now has Eternally been right ——
Politics in Wartime
I whistle in rough kin To a camaraderie of magpies They return trilled warnings in reply As if to say you are no one That we know, a thief of songs Pied and clumsy As any bastard’s fledge We dispute the global south With that stalagmite part of speech You say it depends On which way you uphold the map I say words Are the same in any language Pulling flames like petals from the edge One for love, two for hate, and on Til bare husks are left Black and hard as any rasp Cracked, with a little salt Makes a beggarly repast You say these things are Almost the same I say, halfway home Smoke coiled between my lips They are almost different