for my late cousin Ernest
A bleat of lambs on Junee’s

naïve hills, a kind of white

foam in the dark; the clash

and slam of locomotive carriages:

stubborn cymbals of the Gods or

an ordinary torment? Such hyperbolic

music, I may have caught the railway blues!
How the mind repeats itself;

baked beans, heaped on my enamel

supper plate, chipped as any

conscience, o Nightshift

can your cruel roster!
I should have locked

the garden gate against

those volatile intruders

who swung their Eveready

torches over my lawn sculptures –

I tooled them all myself : a gathering

of penguins, swans, flamingoes

guarding the hydrangeas!
Louts kicked them down and

hurled them round and sprayed

them all with shaving cream (I have

the tin to prove it ), then darkened them

with thrusts of soil – can’t they read – are

they so illiterate – my signs that clearly

say No Trespassing  No Hawkers. I sob

inside this rhetoric of slaughter!