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  have a smell

  like a new lover’s hair

  in winter –

  slippery ice spiced.

  You can’t name the flowers

  going into a foreign forest

  but the leaves blaze

  against the early snow

  like a moment-fire

  blowing into your eyes

  hot. too much. cold.

  JERUSALEM

  I. MY RIGHT HAND’S CUNNING

  Sulfurous Psalm 137

  yowling to the scarred harp

  of exile

  pledges my right hand’s

  cunning

  if I forget Jerusalem

  if I forget if I forget

  but what does my right hand

  know or remember

  as my left hand gnaws

  its bleeding friendless useless knuckles?

  II. DAVID

  When I think of David

  I don’t think of a skinny clapped-out

  senile king

  growling over the juicy young bones

  of his latest concubine –

  nor a hot-eyed paunchy poacher

  of lesser men’s wives,

  the remote-control murderer

  if the cuckolds are a bother –

  nor a father sobbing

  over his beloved hair-strangled enemy

  and eldest son –

  nor a shining darling

  pledging himself to Jonathan

  with the amulet of his breath –

  nor Jerusalem’s poet-in-waiting

  lulling black-dogged Saul

  with the narcotic of song.

  When I think of David

  I crave to be his favourite

  and swing too

  that psalm lasso

  that caught and held forever

  a remote hard god’s pleasure.

  III. MY YOUNG NOSE

  Jerusalem has one delicious smell –

  a fried chickpea

  raucous savoury

  cooked in tantalising mouthful balls

  it sizzles aroma from grubby stalls

  suffused with donkey and camel

  my first taste of street falafel.

  IV. HEROD

  There’s a touch of the Herod

  in my half-breed face.

  Like him I don’t belong

  in this priest-ridden place.

  I hang fancy palaces from the cliffs

  of my fortress lair.

  Our enemies are fanatics.

  They breed like rats.

  Chancer mongrels both

  we know how to behave

  we burn, we slave.

  V. TOPHET

  At all the gates –

  countless and terrifying –

  the enemy gathers.

  Moloch is sulking.

  Is it wrong to ask our best

  to bring their first born

  to the Valley of Hinnom?

  Moloch’s burning-bronze gorge

  our only deliverance.

  And if overnight the enemy

  did suppurate and die

  in their plague-struck tents,

  were we wrong to feed our god?

  Remember us fairly

  for Tophet, the place of fire.

  Tophet, our purifying blood price

  abyss.

  How can you

  who follow in peace

  and wallow in righteousness

  name our sacrifice

  an abomination?

  We didn’t break our hearts

  for God

  we incinerated them.

  Know this –

  We too adore

  our children.

  VI. CRUSADERS

  They don’t like us.

  They won’t marry us.

  We bury ourselves

  catacomb deep

  in high sterile castles.

  Splinters of the True Cross

  burrow like pious worms

  under our nails

  and fester.

  At dawn we cough up gobs

  of our own blood

  not the pure Blood of the Lamb.

  Allah’s hostile breath smells

  mint-tea fresh.

  Our sodden homesick faith

  makes us stink.

  VII. GETHSEMANE

  the bloody bastards

  when your friends get pissed

  and fail you

  the bloody bastards

  even God needs

  short ’n’ sweet ugly speech

  when His friends fail Him

  is it always worse at night

  the long thorn hours

  the hurt, the thirst?

  the flowers may open

  in their fragrant night sweat

  the moon may glow full

  on her Pesach bright trek

  but Godhead is heartless

  the Cup just can’t be passed

  to a single mortal one

  of those bloody bastards.

  VIII. CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

  When priests are pressed for space

  when priests are greedy for grace

  it’s safest to stand clear.

  When I was eighteen

  I followed the incense

  into a waxy-dark Coptic den

  where a grimy cunning hand

  blessed my breast

  with a pinch of holy water.

  Over the pernicious mourning stone

  I was conned and robbed

  of something precious of my own.

  IX. THE STONING OF STEPHEN

  One of the harshest judges unknowingly

  grabbed a nob of meteorite

  to hurl at Stephen.

  A good shot,

  it shattered the shining young man’s

  eye socket,

  spraying through his skull

  galaxies of heresies and alien bugs.

  Was the new martyr’s bloodied vision

  impossible

  or just extraterrestrial?

  X. THE NIGHTINGALE IN MOLOCH

  Is the secret frolic

  in the heart of suffering

  the nightingale in Moloch?

  The bird looks like nothing.

  The bird sounds like no one.

  Moloch is a pine forest

  on roaring resin fire.

  Did some fierily distant Jewish clown

  watch with a little long-view drollery

  when witless Gentiles tore the Temple down?

  XI. MOHAMMAD’S HORSE

  The Anglican churches of my childhood

  had an indelible smell –

  varnished pew

  blent with the Old Spice freshness

  of my young father’s half-Jewish

  beautiful head

  bent over a prayer book.

  On its holiest of holy mountains

  Jerusalem’s gleaming Dome of the Rock

  still holds the faintest faintest

  fragrance –

  amidst all the incessant sectarian human

  squall –

  of a horse, Mohammad’s horse,

  with a sweet horsey sweat on its impatient neck,

  lifting off the Rock for Heaven.

  One star-rushing night I leapt

  from the cold silky stone floor

  of the Sisters of Zion,

  I left the ancient

  Roman street

  where the soldiers teased

  mysterious Jesus,

  I flew over my years to come

  where I live and change

  in bone and blood.

  I flew in the smell

  of Jerusalem,

  I flew in unknowing flood.

  AFRICA

  SOME BIRDS OF AFRICA

  Hornbills are dinosaurs gawking from thorn trees.

  Flamingos are petals flocking around a crater lake.

  The eye devours a lilac-breasted r
oller.

  The heart is wooed for life when a fish eagle whistles.

  The soul needs white-backed vultures.

  WAITING FOR THE CROCODILES

  At last

  I have the appetite

  to make a meal

  of this stenching carcass.

  I will glut

  dizzy with necessity

  on its bloated guts

  then pick it sweet

  and clean.

  But its skin

  buffalo-tough

  defeats me.

  I need patience

  the patience of a vulture

  waiting in the ruffling

  putrid breeze

  for the kindly crocodiles

  to come and rip

  this dead thing

  right open.

  KUSINI CAMP

  ‘A badger on my moment of life’—TED HUGHES

  I too saw a badger

  on my moment of life

  but not dead on an English road

  like Hughes’ fly-blown beautiful animal

  (why are Hughes’ poem-creatures

  always dead, dying or dazzling dangerous?)

  My badger was African.

  Nothing Wind in the Willows

  about him as he emerged

  suddenly

  from an inhospitable termite mound –

  as small mammals do

  in the late afternoon

  on the parched Serengeti.

  Very much alive

  and on a wild animal’s hungry mission

  my badger lumbered

  fluidly

  through a shimmering dusk world

  of presences I could only glimpse

  and now so hungrily

  remember.

  THE FISH EAGLE

  Even when David Livingstone

  was dying

  he couldn’t stop loving

  Africa

  the Africa that made his name

  but killed his wife

  and broke his health

  still sated him

  with rapture

  rapture

  that had never left him

  after he was shaken

  like a mouse

  in the lion’s mouth

  the blessed mouth

  that mauled his arm

  and killed

  his fear of death

  death in the heat

  death in the swamp

  death in his own inevitable

  weakness

  in death’s weakness

  Livingstone wrote of the nearness

  of God

  in the gleaming fecund world

  of dangerous wonder

  burning him up

  in rapture

  in dying rapture

  without a dreg of fear

  he felt nothing but

  restless gratitude

  gratitude in finding

  exactly the god-given word

  to take with him forever

  the call of the fish eagle

  hanging high over the

  beautiful pestilent river

  unearthly

  WOLFGANG

  In the Smithsonian

  specimen brains

  of inferior human species

  float in tanks

  like grainy fish.

  The Wet Collection –

  a century old

  wrong turn

  and fascinating

  embarrassment.

  All the poems I’ve written

  after my trip to Africa

  float in my own tank –

  Heart of Cuteness

  where I hoard and ogle

  wondrous birds, magnificent

  mammals, sublime empty

  landscape and no

  Africans.

  Why am I now conjuring

  Wolfgang?

  The banal truth –

  we were white tourists.

  He was our shy driver-guide

  with the charming colonial name.

  But for me

  Wolfgang dominates the heart

  of one cold Serengeti

  dusk.

  Wolfgang’s soft tentative English

  blurs

  under the clapped-out

  safari jeep engine

  as we bump bump bump

  along the rutted

  bone-littered savannah

  searching for cheetahs.

  Wolfgang wheels us past

  bat-eared foxes and silver-backed jackals

  staring from termite-mound dens.

  Wolfgang cranks

  our necks skywards

  to vultures clotting

  the branches

  of a lone umbrella tree.

  We thrill

  to his sharp eyes

  and gifts of surprise …

  Am I redeemed?

  Or is Wolfgang’s

  proud scalp

  now my tank’s most authentic

  pickled star?

  THE FREAK SONGS

  A song cycle written for performance

  with the music of Jonathan Mills

  THE MALE SEAHORSE

  Sung with passionate pride by a

  conspicuously pregnant male seahorse

  I brew

  the impossible

  I hold

  the impossible

  eggs! eggs!

  that grow that grow

  in my swelling male

  belly

  I hatch

  the impossible

  me

  the pulsing star

  exploding!

  I float through

  the impossible

  the mess the mess

  the milky mess

  of fathering

  I am racked through

  the impossible

  my pain! my pain!

  squirts my brood

  into the water

  What does

  the impossible

  tell me

  tell the world?

  What sacred puzzle

  have I unfurled?

  What freak mystery

  swells me

  with wild wild joy?

  THE WINGED HUMAN

  Sung with bitter disillusion by a man

  with uncontrollably f lapping wings

  Wings, you took advantage

  Wings, you promised

  the earth

  Wings, you promised

  the face of God

  Wings, you said

  I would feel his holy breath

  through my hair

  But like any seduction

  you were just

  a cloud castle

  You promised me

  ecstasy

  You fluttered prettily

  like swan’s down

  You told me nothing

  but dangerous lies

  Because now

  I flap

  in terror

  Because now

  my feet don’t

  know me

  And can’t fly

  a straight line

  Wings, turn me around

  Wings, my freezing blood

  is longing

  to be earthbound

  Wings, you took advantage

  And now I fly

  in fear and trembling

  Wings, you promised

  the face of God

  And now

  And now I fly

  like a kicked sod

  You promised

  you promised

  you promised

  the earth

  You promised

  the face of God.

  THE FRUITS OF ORIGINAL SIN

  Sung with yearning by a suited man

  with a dripping peach for a head

  The fruits of Spring

  are in the sinning

  The smells of Spring

  send my blood spinning
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