Bewildered, by all the things left unsaid
Serendipity, chances lost, cut dead:
Are you wise enough to play the fool?
Or, does this vicious wind of a deep set night
Put out the light and then put out the light?

Memory cuts through: taut, damp cold
Slices through my meagre clothes like a knife
Signs previously hidden by an iron fog suddenly beckon:
Is yours a life lived in vain....nothing quite the same?

Lives lived across a black hole in time.
Listen to the be-jewelled spider-webbed
Frost-filled graveyard echo
Of yew trees shadowed against the moon.

No trembling now from scattered loons.
Eviscerated by all that time can do to
Human hearts and lips and eyes
Wrapped in earth-infected graves

Kissed by the tears of fond remembrance:
Flayed by an ancient consciousness of what is
I stand alone in this freezing unghosted space.
My insides squirming like a snake

As I try to make out this palimpsest of names and dates:
Unspoken frost-whitened eyes freeze..
Free will or fate – always too early or just too fucking late?

Turned away from hearth and home
From the ends of empire,
We walk down these unfriendly urban miles
We, who were born between Belsen and Napalm,
Trying not to bully or bluster or fawn..

We choose to welcome luck, good or bad;
Refugees welcome too: fathers, mothers, children,
Choose to seize the beauty of the day
Hold it fast, then, give it clean away.

 

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