Mná or Fir
after Amy Clampitt’s 'Sea Mouse'
Despite the Smoky Honeyeater of Foja,
this orphanage of possibility contracts:
there are no names for the mutant
children you kill, their deaths concealed
by the forest, there are no names
for their mutant mutant unborn:
beyond even the lacuna’s pale, they
have no sigh or image to show you
the lie of choice when paths diverge -
like the time you were faced with Mná
or Fir and the options made you see
what already has been decided.
John Barleycorn
Between the cured air and the cauterised land,
he burns off his skin, discards his bakelite eyes.
A flute of memory he can’t be sure is his own:
how he died and died among the strawed husks.
The crown of the hill is a fire that saps the hardwood
of the moon and splits the ox-hide of an oak tree,
its blackbirds, musical boxes unwinding into silence
and the limbo of uncertainties.
1 comment:
I wonder what it is that has altered John Barleycorn's perception, so that an oak tree becomes ox-hide, and blackbirds music boxes? And also what awakens unseen in a field, when the sacrificers have gone?
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