Geoff Stevens
Arms and the man
Dark mole on the bracken-freckled skin,
tumulus fortification rising from
the sunbleached gramineae of body hair,
you are my history,
be it a mere pustule on the National corpse.
You do not wart magnificently
on a peninsular hand thrust out
into this island’s battleground sea,
do not stand, cracked and flaky,
yet rampantly impressive,
in proud castellated profile above gullcry saltwaves,
or silhouetted in a gory spilling of sunset,
for you are but a half forgotten evocation
in fibrillated nerve ends that oscillate,
that murmur a far off recognition,
an instinctive genealogical recall,
of earthmound in its importance,
when its voices were the real voices,
of real people,
of flesh, of skin, of bone.
Page(s) 53
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