At 2:40 his head is cleared

though he is dazed and bathed

in wrong noise, he cannot yet

open his eyes though the light

is less blinding than the earth.  
At 3:18 he raises

his arm to wipe his eyes, still half

interned and bearing

only soft clothes.  This is not

a birth but an escape from death:

sorting the equivalences

is only one of the tasks.
I am waiting for his total emergence in pain

and press his form where no one has poured water

or brought warm towels.  Home is a grave and among the things

it buries is differentiations,

but he is not thinking of them his head is full of broken images

that cannot be sorted by the divas of sympathy.
He is not cute dogs that speak in baby languages.

He is not the NYT debate about whether poetry matters.

Skinflint and dizzy with cartridges

like lions on a hypo

we take out our eyes

are virgin eyes

and put them on paper towels to dry.
The red route through

indifference is equivalence

the red route through

equivalence is distinction

the red route through

distinction is action.

The red route through

one house into another

is taken by giant robots

antennae popping like eyes

from their backs, for the homestoi

is the space of politics and my sitting

room can be a smoothed space,

as the sweet grass mowed.
So what if my son came up

through the water with his eyes

open.  So what if he breathed

on the NHS and his cord

wrapped twice around his neck

was gently and silently slipped off

as I dug him up ferried him up

to graze and hear him

singing ‘up above the world’

at 7:45. There are brands of noosing

for rubber necks can be snapped

if braced only by inexpert love:

the first missiles knock

the second collapse

distinctions between storeys.
My other letter today was

to Meg Whitman

of Hewlett Packard and the board

of the USS.  My other son was

trying to remember

who is parents were,

when the sky fell and the air

snuffed him into the loop

of his representative

his improbable survival.


This poem was first published in For the Children of Gaza,

ed. Matthew Staunton and Rethabile Masilo (Onslaught Press, August 2014).