Repose
The fire crouched and died at the kicking of our feet.
We shook our matter, and freed from dust, took the
Bizerte
road between the deserted farms, their shot-
through barns putting us in shade,
in sun, in shade.
At the coming of the convoy we wove into the wheat
field and
hid in its sway, kneeling to the crop, hands
and feet rooted to the ordered
humpy soil.
When the engines past we reformed the line. Above
planes banked and gyred tethered to the fingers of
radio men on the ground.
Our boy counted each flash and boom and there,
there tracing
another column of smoke, practising
the streak of fatherhood that you gave to him.
A rustle built to a rage of weather among the wheat
heads
and pulled my eye back to see where in just a
fraction of time the whole field
convulsed to conjure the path of a lone runner
dodging and
bobbing to escape us, jumping ridges
in the dip and slope of the tended earth.
You disappeared as the air shattered amongst us,
putting us to
another repose, fierce fires, an erasure
to the white of us.
Once you took us to cooled restaurants, where I had
mint
ice, offered to my lips, you pistachio and our boy
a mixture of the two.
