Nicotiana tabacum.L “... a viscid annual or short-lived perennial” In Umbrian fields: stooping, tanned, straw hats over cotton fazzoletti, they slowly pan down lines of green; the flowers, cow-lung pink, clustered in a brazen showing. Heat shimmers the scene unreal; a card discarded from a faded pack, its colours smudged and blurring. On shaded terraces we pour cool wine, gaze while they heap the baskets, carts, and straighten, sighing; take the loads in lines to sheds, seeds of sweat and tiredness shining. * No, thanks, I don’t! Leaves shrivel, twist, contract like hands with fingers yellowing, losing lymph like leaves their cool ellipses. Heat swirls the smoke haze of the shed; in the darkening day a choking, bitter scent. * You cultivate flowers of your own; their petals soft as ash, flyaway as clocks of dandelions. Cut it out! Or down, at least. You’re young... You laugh, inhale, breathe blossoms newly blown, whorled, impalpable, feathery as down. I close my eyes, see petals flake, fall, form loam where spores seed, mycelia creep and black fungi slowly grow. Out of Africa We fly into Africa on an all-in, They boat out of Africa all in. We’ve taken a taxi to the airport. They’ve jolted a week in a scorching truck. Our plane is pressurised. In the truck it was 50° C. Our aircraft is the latest jet. Their craft is a leaking boat. The stewardess serves drinks of choice. Their water bottles run dry halfway. We are coach-borne to 5 star hotels. They are chucked into the sea still far out. We see rain forest, silverbacks, mountains. Their shore is a lava cliff, wave swept. Not many see it. (published in Private Photo Review, Autumn 2008) The Madonna of the Snows Only the stream gurgling under its shawl of ice, a woodcock’s chucking, the north wind’s suck and sigh swinging cots of birch and pine. Her breasts swelled with milk cold as her cradling; her tears were snowflakes drifting down as though they might hush the bundle she rocked in her arms. She hurried past the walls of the cemetery where the newly dead were busy unmaking their bodies and those long gone were shuffling and playing their bones. Lean dogs scratched and scrabbled under the walls with frantic and frozen paws; biting, tearing the bindings of the stillborn – the unbaptised. The space of a breath, a moment slipped from time, a shiver, a tear in death’s veil. A grace as small and soft as a whisper she would never now hear. That was all she could, she would ask for – was it so much to grant? A place for a babe to lie, safe from dog, fox, badger – and man. But the mother of stone on the altar was frozen in her own and antique grief. She had lost her son to a god – what radiance could ever again warm her heart? She mourned his firm flesh, his carpenter’s hands, his voice in the dusk quietly speaking. No god could replace his humanity. Her heart was crystal and ice. The priest was waiting with his stoup of water, shivering by the pool. The woman laid her babe on the step, lifting the cloth from its face. Only the wind wailed thinly in the wicker of branches and boughs; only icicles round the spring reflected her in their sharp and shifting eyes. The space of a breath. No grace that a god gives. The mother’s gaze was fixed. And earth took pity where gods won’t: a vapour rose thin from the spring and hovered over the baby’s lips so it almost seemed to sigh. The priest hurriedly sprinkled the water and muttered the words of a rite. The babe in her arms again, the mother fell to her knees, thanking the statue of stone; her tears falling at last. The priest, too, was thankful; he could now bury the child and – faith restored – return to a fire, a glass of red wine. The earth went back to its dark sleep, cradling a warming babe. from "Blood Line" 2007, Blinking Eye) | 
