The night air slides in again
Full pike and plumb on
the slope. Moorhens screech
in joy, deranged
as demons noosed in rope.
"Go, stretch the rope" at first
The thought protrudes and airs
the sod, but standing on a shoddy spade
he catches on the thought:
and then he lets it go...
He lets it go and stoops to cough:
His ribs they jump, his lungs
Expound upon a wasted grace,
And all the more the moorhens
Sound against his face.
While from afar through sedge,
Through mud, and on the icy twilight
Wades one with whom had born his child
three days ago this night.
Though she had breathed her last
Back then, her eyes they did not close:
He pressed them down by trembling hand
And locked them with a rose...
His ribs they jump, his tears
Roll down in spit and sorrow mad.
The night air slides in again
dissolving all the ironclad refineries
of what they'd hoped;
and also, what they had...
He lays the infant low,
just three days past its birth,
and - fever pitch! - he damns the stars
and swears a curse into the belly
of the earth and
out into the moorhens' lea.
'til I,
his neighbour, came to find him
twisting in a tree.
