A Hole for Belgrade
First a dimple, then a crater, then tarmac cancer gnawing
its way from light like something the council or God
laid on without the usual paperwork.
Then a man with halitosis and a measuring wheel,
the sound of running water that might always
have been there. You can never tell.
That surprises him more than missiles hitting Belgrade,
mass graves turned over, an iron plough in his hands
as he dreams the news each night.
This year he shrugs off May blossom, ignores rhubarb, beheads
daffodils with scarcely a word to his neighbour –
the baker with a Polish past.
No-one takes the hole away, which after all is only half
a hole; who knows when a hole has stopped growing
or just when half a life has passed?
Lying beside his wife at night who smells of hair dye, hot
nylon, unreachable loneliness, he sees the hole
as a suddenly emptied mouth.
Almighty Father. He skims in words, remembered prayers,
one childhood song in which The big ship sails through
the alley-o, the hole caves in,
surprising him again – its lack of warning.
How can it do that? he asks his wife.
First nothing, then a hole?
She’s wiping marmalade from her moustache, thinking
how she’d sliced oranges in her kitchen last autumn,
then seduced the baker she hadn’t
known was Catholic, until he came gasping Hail Mary’s full
of grace. That night he husband lies puzzling over
the thought of taking lives to save them.
Then the sound of lorries, the council digger, hard-core
being tipped, arc lights, voices and a spade
scraping at his nerves.
But council men at night? At night? They leave the hole half-
filled, a plastic fence in place, chalk marks on the road –
the kind that spare the first born.
Five daily papers later, nothing’s changed, except more rubble
in Belgrade, more pictures of the dead unburying
themselves with newsprint blackened hands.
He watches the hole, there in the road, unhealed.
You’ll stay he says forever and ever.
You’ll stay. Amen.
Page(s) 42-43
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