Page 18 - Poems

strains of guilt, add a new-found one for being
Paris – not Beirut and not Kabul nor Mosul –where mayhem and
massacre could still
affront and injure the world: the guilt
of a rare, privileged, innocence —
and yet, and yet, one
on which hinges
hope for all our kind.

Meanwhile, inside memory, inside the riotous carnival of memory
of that night, chapiteaux and masts grow and recede, shudder,
crumble, recede and grow. Reason walks into the wind, perched on
a high-wire sixty metres overhead — sways, falters, loses her pole
and freezes, only to resume. Distrust in spangles and crimson
plumes sashays with puppet-partners. Fumbling, white-faced
certainties toss and drop all their multi-coloured words,
cachinnating through black tears, as must clowns everywhere.
Shadowless beings, fear and also succour and trust and resistance,
sidle into new skins, morph from siren to spider to stag to loup-
garou to kelpie to kinnari, blossoming and wilting, turn by turn, but
always – the lucky bastards – unmaimed and unweeping. And we:
we try, for days, for weeks, for months, to scramble off a carousel
centre-stage, a carousel with only two sets of mounts dangling from
a sky-high pole – many of each, all painted Before or After – and
rides that never cease long enough to flee the platform, never long
enough to graze rhythm and melody, long enough to retrieve poetry.

There is still the moon:
sane, sane and safe and alive,
even when effaced.

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