Out of the Blue Read Free

truth.
    Let us offer one another the kiss of peace.’
    ‘And let no one say that we argue among ourselves,
    for nothing is impossible to God,’ said Peace.
    ‘You speak the truth,’ said Righteousness,
    and she took Peace in her arms tenderly.
    Mercy and Truth have met together
    Justice and Peace have kissed one another .
    They sang together in my dream until the day dawned
    when the church-bells rang for the Resurrection,
    and with that sound I awoke
    and called Kit my wife and Colette my daughter,
    ‘Get up, and honour God’s resurrection,
    creep to the cross, venerate it, kiss it
    like the most precious jewel there is,
    most worthy relic, richest on earth.
    It bore our Lord’s body to do us good,
    and in the shadow of the cross
    no ghosts can gather, no evil can live.’

Smoke
    Old warriors and women
    cough their glots of winter-thick phlegm
    while a dog hackles for the bone
    that the boy on the floor has stolen.
    Whining, mithering children
    in swaddles of urine-damp wool, prickling
    with lice, impetigo and scabies, again
    the toothache, the earache, the scabies, the glands
    battling. Hush by the fire again
    sing him a song, rock him again,
    again, till he sleeps, still whining and wizening.
    On the earth floor rocks his squat cradle
    on the squat earth he has come to,
    while one of the obsolete warriors
    wheezes away at an instrument
    made of sheep’s innards.
    He is a man of skills
    learned painfully, not much of a singer
    wheezing for the second time that evening
    of the boar he killed with a dagger
    of the bear with razor claws
    that scooped out the face of his brother
    then fell to his spear.
    In song he remakes his brother
    and their small play on the earth floor.
    The baby cries. Smoke fills the hall,
    the eyes of warriors and old women,
    and nobody listens.
    There’s the skin of the bear on the floor
    and a hearth gaping with flame
    red-mouthed, then smoke hides it again.
    By thirty everyone’s teeth are broken –
    look at that kid worrying his bone.

Bristol Docks
    Ships on brown water
    wings unruffling
    masts steep and clean,
    There goes the dredger,
    there the steam crane
    downcast, never used.
    Tide goes wherever
    tide goes,
    forty foot rise
    forty foot fall,
    ship waiting
    to clear Hotwells.
    Time rises
    time falls.
    Two hundred years
    shrink to nothing,
    huge tides
    shrunk to a drop
    caught in a cup
    where the men sip
    tea, coffee
    laced with rum,
    talk venturing
    westward, moneyward.
    This is the slaver
    money funded,
    good money
    from tradesmen’s pockets,
    guinea by guinea
    fed into it.
    Double it, treble it,
    build on it.
    Don’t stare –
    you’ll cross them:
    William Miller,
    Isaac Elton,

    Merchant Trader,
    Merchant Venturer,
    powerful men.
    Edward Colston’s
    almshouses
    (slaver panelled)
    still standing.
    Sugar houses
    (easy burning)
    all gone,
    brown water
    brown rum.
    Custom House
    African House
    bonded warehouse
    almshouse
    sugar house.
    Mud slack
    licking its chops,
    bright water
    fighting to rise.
    Look in their eyes.
    They’ll stare you down
    for it takes guts
    to get returns.
    Investor,
    speculator,
    accumulator,
    benefactor.
    See their white wings
    fledge on the Avon.
    They speak of cargo,
    profit-margins,
    schools they’ve founded,
    almshouses.
    If you stare
    at the brown water
    you will see nothing,
    every reflection
    sucked and gone.
    Slaver’s gone
    on savage wings,
    beak preying.
    Tradesmen’s guineas
    got their return:
    coffee, cotton,
    cocoa, indigo,
    sugar, rum,
    church windows,
    fine houses,
    fine tombstone
    for Edward Colston,
    the cry of gulls
    goes after them
    always lamenting,
    always fresh
    beaks stabbing
    at their soul-flesh.

The spill
    Those words like oil, loose in the world,
    spilling from fingertip to fingertip
    besmirching lip after lip,
    the burn; the spillage of harm.
    Those words like ash, mouth-warm.

Without remission
    Because she told a lie, he says,
    because she lied
    about the hands not washed before shopping,
    she had to learn,
    because he