There were three other customers:
Mary sitting in old Joe's lap,
Her crazy son in the corner
With arms spread wide and a broken neck.
LES MURRAY
The
Ballad
of
the Barbed Wire Ocean
No more rice pudding. Pink coupons for Plume. Smokes under the lap
for aunts.
Four running black boots beside a red sun. Flash wireless words like
Advamce.
When the ocean was wrapped in barbed wire, terror radiant up the
night
sky,
exhilaration raced flat out in squadrons; Mum's friends took off sun-hats
to cry.
Starting south of the then world with new showground rifles being
screamed at and shown
for a giggle-suit three feeds a day and no more plans of your own,
it went with some swagger till God bless you, Tom! and Daddy come
back! at the train
or a hoot up the gangways for all the girls and soon the coast fading in
run,
but then it was flared screams from blood-bundles whipped rolling as
iron bombers keened down
and the insect-eyed bombers burned their crews alive in off-register henna
and brown.
In steep ruins of rainforest pre-affluent thousands ape-scuttling mixed
sewage with blood
and fear and the poem played vodka to morals, fear jolting to
~he
mouth like cud.
