have a smell
like a new lover’s hair
in winter –
slippery ice spiced.
You can’t name the flowers
going into a foreign forest
but the leaves blaze
against the early snow
like a moment-fire
blowing into your eyes
hot. too much. cold.
JERUSALEM
I. MY RIGHT HAND’S CUNNING
Sulfurous Psalm 137
yowling to the scarred harp
of exile
pledges my right hand’s
cunning
if I forget Jerusalem
if I forget if I forget
but what does my right hand
know or remember
as my left hand gnaws
its bleeding friendless useless knuckles?
II. DAVID
When I think of David
I don’t think of a skinny clapped-out
senile king
growling over the juicy young bones
of his latest concubine –
nor a hot-eyed paunchy poacher
of lesser men’s wives,
the remote-control murderer
if the cuckolds are a bother –
nor a father sobbing
over his beloved hair-strangled enemy
and eldest son –
nor a shining darling
pledging himself to Jonathan
with the amulet of his breath –
nor Jerusalem’s poet-in-waiting
lulling black-dogged Saul
with the narcotic of song.
When I think of David
I crave to be his favourite
and swing too
that psalm lasso
that caught and held forever
a remote hard god’s pleasure.
III. MY YOUNG NOSE
Jerusalem has one delicious smell –
a fried chickpea
raucous savoury
cooked in tantalising mouthful balls
it sizzles aroma from grubby stalls
suffused with donkey and camel
my first taste of street falafel.
IV. HEROD
There’s a touch of the Herod
in my half-breed face.
Like him I don’t belong
in this priest-ridden place.
I hang fancy palaces from the cliffs
of my fortress lair.
Our enemies are fanatics.
They breed like rats.
Chancer mongrels both
we know how to behave
we burn, we slave.
V. TOPHET
At all the gates –
countless and terrifying –
the enemy gathers.
Moloch is sulking.
Is it wrong to ask our best
to bring their first born
to the Valley of Hinnom?
Moloch’s burning-bronze gorge
our only deliverance.
And if overnight the enemy
did suppurate and die
in their plague-struck tents,
were we wrong to feed our god?
Remember us fairly
for Tophet, the place of fire.
Tophet, our purifying blood price
abyss.
How can you
who follow in peace
and wallow in righteousness
name our sacrifice
an abomination?
We didn’t break our hearts
for God
we incinerated them.
Know this –
We too adore
our children.
VI. CRUSADERS
They don’t like us.
They won’t marry us.
We bury ourselves
catacomb deep
in high sterile castles.
Splinters of the True Cross
burrow like pious worms
under our nails
and fester.
At dawn we cough up gobs
of our own blood
Allah’s hostile breath smells
mint-tea fresh.
Our sodden homesick faith
makes us stink.
VII. GETHSEMANE
the bloody bastards
when your friends get pissed
and fail you
the bloody bastards
even God needs
short ’n’ sweet ugly speech
when His friends fail Him
is it always worse at night
the long thorn hours
the hurt, the thirst?
the flowers may open
in their fragrant night sweat
the moon may glow full
on her Pesach bright trek
but Godhead is heartless
the Cup just can’t be passed
to a single mortal one
of those bloody bastards.
VIII. CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
When priests are pressed for space
when priests are greedy for grace
it’s safest to stand clear.
When I was eighteen
I followed the incense
into a waxy-dark Coptic den
where a grimy cunning hand
blessed my breast
with a pinch of holy water.
Over the pernicious mourning stone
I was conned and robbed
of something precious of my own.
IX. THE STONING OF STEPHEN
One of the harshest judges unknowingly
grabbed a nob of meteorite
to hurl at Stephen.
A good shot,
it shattered the shining young man’s
eye socket,
spraying through his skull
galaxies of heresies and alien bugs.
Was the new martyr’s bloodied vision
impossible
or just extraterrestrial?
X. THE NIGHTINGALE IN MOLOCH
Is the secret frolic
in the heart of suffering
the nightingale in Moloch?
The bird looks like nothing.
The bird sounds like no one.
Moloch is a pine forest
on roaring resin fire.
Did some fierily distant Jewish clown
watch with a little long-view drollery
when witless Gentiles tore the Temple down?
XI. MOHAMMAD’S HORSE
The Anglican churches of my childhood
had an indelible smell –
varnished pew
blent with the Old Spice freshness
of my young father’s half-Jewish
beautiful head
bent over a prayer book.
On its holiest of holy mountains
Jerusalem’s gleaming Dome of the Rock
still holds the faintest faintest
fragrance –
amidst all the incessant sectarian human
squall –
of a horse, Mohammad’s horse,
with a sweet horsey sweat on its impatient neck,
lifting off the Rock for Heaven.
One star-rushing night I leapt
from the cold silky stone floor
of the Sisters of Zion,
I left the ancient
Roman street
where the soldiers teased
mysterious Jesus,
I flew over my years to come
where I live and change
in bone and blood.
I flew in the smell
of Jerusalem,
I flew in unknowing flood.
AFRICA
SOME BIRDS OF AFRICA
Hornbills are dinosaurs gawking from thorn trees.
Flamingos are petals flocking around a crater lake.
The eye devours a lilac-breasted r
oller.
The heart is wooed for life when a fish eagle whistles.
The soul needs white-backed vultures.
WAITING FOR THE CROCODILES
At last
I have the appetite
to make a meal
of this stenching carcass.
I will glut
dizzy with necessity
on its bloated guts
then pick it sweet
and clean.
But its skin
buffalo-tough
defeats me.
I need patience
the patience of a vulture
waiting in the ruffling
putrid breeze
for the kindly crocodiles
to come and rip
this dead thing
right open.
KUSINI CAMP
‘A badger on my moment of life’—TED HUGHES
I too saw a badger
on my moment of life
but not dead on an English road
like Hughes’ fly-blown beautiful animal
(why are Hughes’ poem-creatures
always dead, dying or dazzling dangerous?)
My badger was African.
Nothing Wind in the Willows
about him as he emerged
suddenly
from an inhospitable termite mound –
as small mammals do
in the late afternoon
on the parched Serengeti.
Very much alive
and on a wild animal’s hungry mission
my badger lumbered
fluidly
through a shimmering dusk world
of presences I could only glimpse
and now so hungrily
remember.
THE FISH EAGLE
Even when David Livingstone
was dying
he couldn’t stop loving
Africa
the Africa that made his name
but killed his wife
and broke his health
still sated him
with rapture
rapture
that had never left him
after he was shaken
like a mouse
in the lion’s mouth
the blessed mouth
that mauled his arm
and killed
his fear of death
death in the heat
death in the swamp
death in his own inevitable
weakness
in death’s weakness
Livingstone wrote of the nearness
of God
in the gleaming fecund world
of dangerous wonder
burning him up
in rapture
in dying rapture
without a dreg of fear
he felt nothing but
restless gratitude
gratitude in finding
exactly the god-given word
to take with him forever
the call of the fish eagle
hanging high over the
beautiful pestilent river
unearthly
WOLFGANG
In the Smithsonian
specimen brains
of inferior human species
float in tanks
like grainy fish.
The Wet Collection –
a century old
wrong turn
and fascinating
embarrassment.
All the poems I’ve written
after my trip to Africa
float in my own tank –
Heart of Cuteness
where I hoard and ogle
wondrous birds, magnificent
mammals, sublime empty
landscape and no
Africans.
Why am I now conjuring
Wolfgang?
The banal truth –
we were white tourists.
He was our shy driver-guide
with the charming colonial name.
But for me
Wolfgang dominates the heart
of one cold Serengeti
dusk.
Wolfgang’s soft tentative English
blurs
under the clapped-out
safari jeep engine
as we bump bump bump
along the rutted
bone-littered savannah
searching for cheetahs.
Wolfgang wheels us past
bat-eared foxes and silver-backed jackals
staring from termite-mound dens.
Wolfgang cranks
our necks skywards
to vultures clotting
the branches
of a lone umbrella tree.
We thrill
to his sharp eyes
and gifts of surprise …
Am I redeemed?
Or is Wolfgang’s
proud scalp
now my tank’s most authentic
pickled star?
THE FREAK SONGS
A song cycle written for performance
with the music of Jonathan Mills
THE MALE SEAHORSE
Sung with passionate pride by a
conspicuously pregnant male seahorse
I brew
the impossible
I hold
the impossible
eggs! eggs!
that grow that grow
in my swelling male
belly
I hatch
the impossible
me
the pulsing star
exploding!
I float through
the impossible
the mess the mess
the milky mess
of fathering
I am racked through
the impossible
my pain! my pain!
squirts my brood
into the water
What does
the impossible
tell me
tell the world?
What sacred puzzle
have I unfurled?
What freak mystery
swells me
with wild wild joy?
THE WINGED HUMAN
Sung with bitter disillusion by a man
with uncontrollably f lapping wings
Wings, you took advantage
Wings, you promised
the earth
Wings, you promised
the face of God
Wings, you said
I would feel his holy breath
through my hair
But like any seduction
you were just
a cloud castle
You promised me
ecstasy
You fluttered prettily
like swan’s down
You told me nothing
but dangerous lies
Because now
I flap
in terror
Because now
my feet don’t
know me
And can’t fly
a straight line
Wings, turn me around
Wings, my freezing blood
is longing
to be earthbound
Wings, you took advantage
And now I fly
in fear and trembling
Wings, you promised
the face of God
And now
And now I fly
like a kicked sod
You promised
you promised
you promised
the earth
You promised
the face of God.
THE FRUITS OF ORIGINAL SIN
Sung with yearning by a suited man
with a dripping peach for a head
The fruits of Spring
are in the sinning
The smells of Spring
send my blood spinning