An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless — a book sealed;

Little Enoch learned his colors from lettered blocks

(for a is the color of fleet,
b is the color of war and demolition,
c is the color of echo and blur,
& c.) and built
a bricolage:

So cab was a whirring warbler.
bach was the Spanish Armada crashing
and crashing.
And enoch he couldn’ t describe.

And when it reached the height of Enoch,
standing, he tore whole tongues
down to their colors.

1

Gently disintegrate me
Said nothing at all.

Is there still time to say
Said I myself lying
In a bower of bramble
Into which I have fallen.

Look through my eyes up
At blue with not anything
We could have ever arranged
Slowly taking place.

Above the spires of the fox
Gloves and above the bracken
Tops with their young heads
Recognising the wind,
The armies of the empty
Blue press me further
Into Zennor Hill.

I’ ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’ s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’ s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’ s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships