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Alan Whitaker

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Redemption

I went back, on my knees,
doubled up and lurching
into the corridor of bones and clinker;
crawling in the lee of towering embankments,

burrowing the black earth,
still as words remembered,
shining as the rain on her lips
before she burned her imprint in my hand.

I was here when the storm broke open the sky,
with shards of piercing light;
it was here I nursed my stab wounds,
damned and alone in a year of earthquakes

The scars never dried, weeping like the beck
I could hear from my bedroom on nights
when the willows were still,
the long nights of murmur and crystal.

The conversations that were beyond me then,
I gathered up and later understood,
words remembered, now repeated alone
in a wasted place of death and graffiti.

By the broken gate, the hallowed ground
has forced me to my knees, pulsing faster
than my heart, louder than the thunder
which sent me cowering when I was young.

Nothing ever dies,
it is only hidden for an instant,
silent and quivering between the black earth
and the dull grey of the shattered sky,

but always there, circling like a hawk,
rising and falling in ancient heat,
but always there,
always there.

 

Page(s) 57

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