I

Prelude

II

Wires twist ...
round cortex and ankle.
Slow image, painful, breathless...
seen from behind, four or five dispersed,
walk forward beneath the living branches ...
Sliding through cropped grass boots and shoes
and then the foreknown about to happen, any moment some unspeakable thing.

III

... ask for nothing, so that the souls might one by one set sail.

IV

Near oblivion
a strange excitement
Visible through a gap in needles of juniper past a sunlit white stone wall ...

V

... a cascade of rough bark tearing your fingertips off
in a collapse of earth ...
a backbone hurting, flayed, the light’s body a human sees with love,
opening a mouth in horror at the moon.

VI

Distance perhaps
is all for the best. Sufficient for the day are piles of ash.

VII

So much blood in the wind ...
Some coherence comes in daily life with effort.
By the conformity of the astronomical universe we are not consoled.
What avails coherence for the woman whose nose they cut off?
We swarm but are not driven like a swarm of rats...

VIII

Visible through a gap in needles of juniper ...
The tress of ivy
clings to the roof
aging faster and more often than the ancient house ...

IX

Worn down by years of feet
The stairs you see
I took a second look ...
Once the room had housed
A family...

X

Now it is difficult.
The graves go down.
Deeper.
The dead are tangled in a heap,
Scooped up and in and left to rot.
Waves of them come up with a stink,
Agony in the gaping rhomboid mouths,
Some with bedroom slippers on their feet.
So many, how to identify them?

How insert into such a moist dissolution
The fizz of feeling what they felt?
How hard the spade treats their pit,
For the antique mass graves were no prettier;

Below bright multitudes there was only earth.

Herded by radio signals, decrepit codes,
And closing now the hoop, above the business,
Killers converge, dull as dirt itself.

XI

On their torches, black and twisting,
You will see the heavens rain
Fires, fruits of many colours,
Of seeds a glittering cascade.

If your heavens wheel and wheel,
The reason is that there you winnow
Treasure upturned on the centre
Point where all is at an end.

Bibliographic Information
Christopher Middleton. Collected Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press Limited, 2008.

I

The eye turns black...
I was born in a mellower year,
A year when people still paused at the smell of corpses.
Now I smell the roasting of a thigh ...
He pours on more kerosene
And the fire glows and the smell of flesh gets stronger.

... my father said, ‘Whoever goes sniffing out corpses would want to be rid of their stench.

But it was a mellower year;
A year when people still paused.
A year that saw the barrier go down between me and that smell.

II

... the script of storms ...
The panic of rabbits.

III

Passing through the clouds
I peer down on the city
Its roofs are stacked with the nests of storks while its palms are fans for its siesta,
Lending it shade and a breeze for the streets,
There are boats unmoored ...
... now it’s clear that the city looks more like a corpse
Hovered over with wings that end in claws.

IV

You, who avoid coming close,
We would advise you to tremble.
Although you see in our cities ruins and skeletons,
We are not victims of some past epidemic.
Nor were we ever fodder for lost wars.
No, we are your mirror.

V

On the river’s bank there’s a death squad ten strong, ten they have killed;
And someone is weeping there.
I know the water only by the reflection of each star.
Time marching briefly with swift steps reaping his human crops.
I imagine me without a mouth, without even a lung.
Useless as a witness
Rowing away into darkness towards the open sea.

VI

Me this, isolate sculpture. I’m cold.
My plinth is the void.

VII

And wet were the willow groves on sandy, sodden banks nearby,
Wet and rusty were the carved arms of the benches, the short arms of the lamp posts.
Wet was the smell of the grill ...
And staking out the ground,
Wet were wooden fences that run between one cafe and the next,
Between each bar and the sidewalk;
Fences ...
Fences that wend behind wisteria and hoard the webs of spiders...

VIII

I place my forehead on the plate glass-front
And peered in at the darkness...
And there was nothing there for me to look for.

... see some corpses floating down ...
Be frightened, brother. I am.

I’ll simply go on smouldering
And spread this smoke around.
Let everything go hazy...

Another died within his coat as he tore at his insides...

For what? For nothing. Nothing...
Blown away like spindrift...

No, we are your mirror.

IX

And peered in at the darkness ...
And there was nothing there for me to look for ...

The silence is sour, and remote as some fountain of wool;
My feet are so light they hardly make a sound.
How do I answer the call of the current ...
I will drink out the bottle until the scent bleeds out of me
and the soul can be seen through my body ...

... for a friend they burnt in a pool of acid,
Or for someone left like a scarecrow standing guard over a minefield.

Skulls and fragments of bone,
Wreckage ...
given thicker presence by the mud.
You can’t get away from the sight of those mouths where the breath is stilled.

Is there to be some revivification of their torn bodies?
Is the dawn to be?

Bibliographic Information
Fawzi Karim, with Anthony Howell and Abbas Kadhim, translators. Plague Lands and Other Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press Limited, 2011.