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Julia Casterton

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Shrovetide

Coming out of a war zone is tricky,
you’ve got devastation to work through.

You need a detoxification chamber,
a sort of Great Good Place where you can learn

not to be a horde of Bosnian kids mugging people on the Tube.
You need someone to say

Nobody Wants to Kill You,
you’re among friends. People here know about rape and pillage

and they’ve had enough. Look! They’re gardeners.
They can have a good dig in the earth.

They can make things.
Nobody’s wearing fuck-me shoes because here

we like naked feet. You won’t get bored
when you have to look where you’re walking.

People touch. They press. They knead one another
hard. This, we’ve found, is more satisfying

than making holes in human flesh. We’ve done that.
The quick, we’ve discovered, are more lovely

than the dead. But we understand
why some slip back -

It’s hard to get used to so much joy.
We’ve come to think of it as a permanent

state of emergency. There’s always a state of emergency
in heaven.



Untitled illustration


Julia Casterton teaches writing in London and is widely published in magazines, anthologies and collections.

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