The Partitioned Wailing Wall - Part One

for Alan Painter I have put into many ports labelled: handle with care stood on the wharfs, bare-shouldered up to the knee, unloading cashew and coconuts and then set sail again finding no substance to trade with I have seen the waters rising and the walls submerge the roofs converge the children washed on the battlements I have heard the chasm cries Stifled under jackboots the whimpering against walls lost somewhere in the hoarse Gött mit Uns ! Come home, she cried, strappadoed in the lap of jettisoning tribes Come home, my weary ones home to toil and die labour and sigh curse and cry Did he not withdraw to that holy backwater by Milan and with the cup of his Confessions bathe his horrent sins away I listened to a story that our first quarter remembered to tell but the waters of the Himavant had long curdled in the breast of the suttee wife I listened long in the myopic light disfigured in the white heat of our Enlightenment to the trapped voices of inquiry before all the mania of demigods trumped through the weaning years in the delirious lust of revenge And then, and then I did not care what happened what could happen there was life it was worth having So I went labelled: handle with care Who are those people skimming past the mortal coast torch untouched by hand in the drowning mists have they no work to do And that rope of smoke A troubling dizziness rising out of the funnel of the Black Forest where professors they say guide the race in the aftermath of charred marrow tissue brain Yet I see no mists, no ghosts No coasts, only torches and parades and blocks and blocks of beering beef and munition mounds and in the not too open days froth in the lolling oceans and bowelling brain-splattered skies even like unmapped sunset glories now the Krakatua lies spent fished out of some Japanese isle the false auroras of enchanting horizons when soughing metallic dust courses through skulls lava in an epileptic fit (...continued in Part Two)