Beyond the Breech

(Winner of the Bundaberg Arts Festival Poetry Prize)

If he once knew the light, it has not been

Self-evident, since he first turned and ran

Headlong for some despite he caught alone

Against the loveless brick of Birmingham.

 

For somewhere in the swell and moan he heard,

Before the velvet sac was ever breached,

Some godhead shuffle by him at the groan,

And beat him at the tunnel, to the street.

 

And leave to him the darkness of the cloud

Each bomber wrought, to prove that life was vain,

His heart, a tiny echo of the sound

Their dull explosions patterned at his brain.

 

Until he turned in panic, at the tide

And breeched, before the nurse could stem the flood

To kick his way in terror at the slide,

And cringe in silence, smeared with foetal blood.

 

While circled by a thousand crystal fires

He lay awhile, pretending to be dead,

But caught the acrid odour at his eyes,

And felt the windows splinter at his head.

 

The scent of fear had drowned the mother’s smell,

And then the rubber, at the Mickey mask

Some torturer had long designed to spell

And catch his breath, and turn his mouth to ash.

 

And years that fled still saw him move in fear

On any street that threatened to confine,

He kept his silence strictly, by the year,

And breathed his air, and sought his own define.

 

While ‘who’ and ‘why’ and ‘what’ he read as lies

To twist and chart some long-term disarray,

To set the furrowed frown behind the eyes

That caught the mother, fretful at the clay.

 

That saw the father age beyond his years

And stoop, and grey, and crumble at his dust,

Before the woman’s iron glance of love

Could humble, with her every tradesman’s lust.

 

While he would play each rubbled hole that sank

Its memories in one explosive burst,

And catch his breath in shelters, dark and rank

Where he could tilt at shadows of his dearth.

 

And so he grew, and caught the early hope

That given time, he might explain his need

To drive each explanation from his mind

Before the questions drove him from his creed.

 

But dark suspicion brooded at each lie

And paralysed his will to move ahead,

He sought a deeper shadow at the thigh

To tempt from some unlovely wanton’s bed.

 

Where he might coven, safe within her kind,

The darkness mask his fear before the breech

That sent him panicked, at some shrapnel rhyme

To burrow at the sigh, and taste the heat.

 

And lend him to another’s frantic need

To feel some other flesh against her kind,

While he would wheel, and turn within his creed

To catch some distant echoes in his mind.

 

Bur search as ever searched, there’s not a key

To tempt from time the secrets of that room,

Where distant shades of faded memory

Would drift, unbidden, at my mother’s womb.

 

Bleak northern skies, you lost me at the spell

I carried since I spent my rabid wail,

I dredged my answers at your turbid well

In some attempt to grieve my tarnished grail.

 

But now I wait each bomb that breached the womb

To rain its horror, stain your crystal fires,

To end whatever need I ever felt

To answer for your self-lit funeral pyres.

 

David Lewis Paget