Back in the city, an alien land,
I walk as some revenant might do
or a visitor from another planet
who nobody sees or sees right through
unsighted eyes passing by on another side.
I've been to the great south
a thousand miles of turbulent sea,
Drake's Passage a roar of wind
below Cape Horn,
albatross turning astern
perpetual motion
hours, days, months
circling the frozen ocean.
Glaciers as high as mountains
calve archipelagos from cliffs of snow,
icebergs drifting among the growlers, bergy bits
and brash beyond the fast ice.
Pintardos turn in the grey air.
Penguin cries break solitarily the overcast silences.
Long abandoned huts, memories of enquiring visitors
slowly decay in the restless wind -
the storm shattering the mirror glass,
three men from Faraday Station
lost on the ice shelf,
uncomforted death, slow probably, full of thoughts,
the floe drifting out to sea
with the wind never changing.
Nobody down there lives for long,
Only the snowy petrels fly in the endless night
Offshore the orcas seek out
the returning penguins in the spring.
My spirit rises to that magnificence of buried rock,
ever moving sheets of ice,
the endless song of the banshee wind.
In a land without people I am human;
in all that terrible beauty I remain beyond.
Back in the city I walk the streets
as a revenant might do or a visitor
from the ice land's silences.
I find quiet corners in which to weep
for the blinkered faces, the sudden look of pain on a schoolboy's face, satchels too heavy on his back perhaps or some other sudden recognition
instantly closed off as he sees my glance,
Christmas lights mocking the cold flow
of coins in comely gutters.
I weep for that girl's face bound with tape,
a hole in it to give her air,
while they did the unimaginable and slowly killed her dead:
all of us responsible.
And the little boy thrown on the railway line
sliced up by the unknowing train
by other boys the perpetrators - boys you note not men
nor the matronly she-bitch of Gloucester neither.
These are but samples -
Celine Figard's the latest,
a foreign guest.
Do not forget her name
Dunblane.
Nobody sees the tears
dropping behind a newspaper.
Antarctica's magnificence too pure
for human eyes, I 've come back
from the wind-drift waves
gag on it
disgust
the oil washing up
on Skomer Island.
Back in the city, an alien land,
I walk as some revenant might do
or a visitor from another planet
who nobody sees or sees right through,
passing by on another side
unsighted eyes
my eyes have seen.
11 December 1995 Revised 1 January 1996
Revised 20 February 1996. 2. November 1999.