Poem - Repose

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.