Poems - 2

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"Honourable Men"

Honourable men do not decieve their sons.
They do not send them off to France
To lose the hands they once shook firm farewell.
And honourable men do not go visiting
In casualty, to pin to pillows ribboned
Marks of bravery. No, this they do not do.

The honourable speak in Truths in any tongue
To those that might be enemies.
And when their talk and threats and
All their promises have come to naught but fighting
This is what they do: Honourable men
Take up the Enfields and they man the lines they've drawn.

[untitled, re: WWI]

I'd touch the hands of warriors,
Dead upon the battlefield.
In stiff repose and awkward pose
Unnatural. Nobody still alive
Would sit so bent and twisted.
A man in pieces, strewn about
The grasses with the casings
Of his fellow soldiers' shells.

Here, one lays as if he were awake,
Eyes staring, paling, at the sun,
As if he were amused to look
Unblinking into such a bleaching light.
Unrumpled, neat and peaceful
He is out of place. You'd never
Know but that he were alive
Until you spot a hole, so very small.

"Licence"

Having known her all this time
Provides me with no licence.
Beyond the sugars in her tea,
The earrings that she favours
With a certain blouse... then what?
When I am driving and she stares
Off to the treeline she is thinking,
And of what I cannot guess.

But I am champion. Of all of us
Who know so very little
Of her depth and her intention
I know more than all.
If anything is hers to share
It's to my ears she whispers in the night.
And she is powerful. She catches me
Appraising her and smiles to know my wonder.

"Afterwards"

Afterwards, when we lay languid
And quiescent on the sheets,
And recent perspiration struggles
Hopelessly against the heat
My head is slick upon your breast
Above your heart, and, as its beats,
My breathing tends to calmness
From the pacing of our feat.

From innocence of kiss we made
No sudden leap to finished deed,
But seeped and crept, like flowing Nile
Relentless at her seaward speed.
And as she to her delta flows
As vessel to the silt and seed
We empty of ourselves those things
That sate the others inner needs.

We speak. We speak aloud of things
That with no other we would share.
We take from one another what
From others we would never dare.
And that beyond our sight and reach
Seems neither to be here nor there
To us. There is no import save
Our comfort, now, serene and bare.

"Ground Zero"

80,000. Flash! And not a one
To tell the story of existance
At the centre of a sun for just a moment.
Not the impact of a fist into the face;
Not the bleeding drain of life
Through some infliction of the blade;
Not the thunder of a musket volley
Masked behind the smoke of dirty powder.

This is Genesis itself, the atom rendered
For its energy in instants. One to two
To four to eight and on, a geometric
Multiplicity. And naked ingenuity
Of fleshy men makes nothing but a fire
Of rancour. Days and weeks and years
Of labour piled atop each other, brought
To ground, in 1945.

Comments, Complaints, Suggestions: Steven McKinnon