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I never hear that one is dead Without the chance of Life Afresh annihilating me That mightiest Belief, Too mighty for the Daily mind That tilling it’s abyss, Had Madness, had it once or, Twice The yawning Consciousness, Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue When Terror were it told In any Tone commensurate Would strike us instant Dead - I do not know the man so bold He dare in lonely Place That awful stranger - Consciousness Deliberately face -

I never hear the word “Escape” Without a quicker blood, A sudden expectation – A flying attitude! I never hear of prisons broad By soldiers battered down, But I tug childish at my bars Only to fail again!

I never saw that land before, And now can never see it again; Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar Endeared, by gladness and by pain, Great was the affection that I bore To the valley and the river small, The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees, The chickens from the farmsteads, all Elm-hidden, and the tributaries Descending at equal interval; The blackthorns down along the brook With wounds yellow as crocuses Where yesterday the labourer’s hook Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze That hinted all and nothing spoke. I neither expected anything Nor yet remembered: but some goal I touched then; and if I could sing What would not even whisper my soul As I went on my journeying, I should use, as the trees and birds did, A language not to be betrayed; And what was hid should still be hid Excepting from those like me made Who answer when such whispers bid.

— Bahram (Pakistani 14-year-old held in an Afghan prison) Like the pied piper the mullah drives his battered truck through dusty villages, his loudspeaker singing:Join the battle against the infidels. Fight for Jihad and live eternally with Allah. Lift up your guns for Him and you shall never die.

I never wish to sing again as I used to, when two new eyes could always stain the sea, of tangent worlds, indolent as callows, and the clock went backward for a skip, to rise, to set. Some will twine grass to fit in a thimble, some will carve bread to mend a craggy wall, some in the slantest midnight cry for sleep. When the pitch-owl swallows the moon, what welt will show it? Sighing helps nothing, raspberries raw and green, in the form of a heart imperfectly divided. A wave grows sharper close to the shore. Some own words like strips of scape and summon. It is possible to suffer even in the sun. And race the steep noon to its highest, hoary gate. Stares drop under the sky; silence of a windslap; and a scar drifts out of air to stand whistling: She who listens poorly will always be calling. She who sounds silence drowns with the dumb. She who cuts her hands off must drink with her tongue.

I once was a child am a child am someone's child not my mother's not my father's the boss gave us special treatment treatment for something special a lollipop or a sticker glitter from the toy box the better we did the better the plastic prize made in China one year everyone got a spinning top one year everyone got a tap on their shoulders one year everyone was fired everyone fired but me one year we all lost our words one year my father lost his words to a stroke a stroke of bad luck stuck his words used to be so worldly his words fired him let him go without notice can they do that can she do that yes she can in this land she can once we sang songs around a piano this land is your land this land is my land in this land someone always owns the land in this land someone who owns the land owns the buildings on the land owns the people in the buildings unless an earthquake sucks the land in like a long noodle

I tell you that I see her still At the dark entrance of the hall. One gas lamp burning near her shoulder Shone also from her other side Where hung the long inaccurate glass Whose pictures were as troubled water. An immense shadow had its hand Between us on the floor, and seemed To hump the knuckles nervously, A giant crab readying to walk, Or a blanket moving in its sleep. You will remember, with a smile Instructed by movies to reminisce, How strict her corsets must have been, How the huge arrangements of her hair Would certainly betray the least Impassionate displacement there. It was no rig for dallying, And maybe only marriage could Derange that queenly scaffolding— As when a great ship, coming home, Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail And loosing all the tackle that had laced Her in the long lanes .... I know We need not draw this figure out. But all that whalebone came from whales. And all the whales lived in the sea, In calm beneath the troubled glass, Until the needle drew their blood. I see her standing in the hall, Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam, And the black flukes of agony Beat at the air till the light blows out.

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun leaned up against a tree and the entrails spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked between the tendons of its back legs to a high branch that gently creaked like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil. Blood drained into a pail, you could smell it shifting with the air, and black flies landed in the shadows of things where the wind didn’t touch. I dreamed I was carrying a sack filled with animals, and it dragged blood in the gravel and stained my skirt hem, you could follow my trail to the county line where old men sat on the liquor store porch. One crooked his half-arm for the bottle where the auger had caught his hand. I dreamed I was in a new country rinsing livers under a spigot, and the men cracking black walnuts on a stone named my limbs like the weather, like none of us knew the same words. By the tree the girls and the goat were faltering, one squatted to sharpen her blackened blade on a strop, and the men on the county line leaned back on the heels of their chairs talking about anything, each other, spring weather, the long-haired boy scalped by a combine, and one of them swore you only plant beans with the moon in Capricorn otherwise the fields choke up with scrub juniper. One looked intently at his left palm; his right wrist uselessly brushed the woven seat of his chair. When a wind came, the screen door leapt up on its leather hinges which never creaked and slammed shut. Mud daubers in the muck by the spigot blew sideways around my ankles and up under my skirt, and inside I could hear the woman who lived with the liquor store proprietor cursing as she locked up the vanilla like she knew how to break the back of a ghost.

I pinch myself hard on the inner arm, inwardly smiling yet frightened too – what if I get caught in this far realm, on the underside of the world, in these pixelated centuries where humans are exactly the same, both kind and radically unkind – So anyway, I say, her husband has his ships ready to go to war, and he’s waiting for the wind. He decides to order the sacrifice of their daughter – the wind comes, and they sail off to defend a trading route at Troy. Jade says, And this trading route is called “Helen”? Very good. OK, skip ten years. When the husband comes back, his wife unrolls a purple carpet and his cousin prepares a banquet. His wife says, Darling, the slave-girls have run you a bath. He bathes. His wife finds out there’s someone at the front door from Troy, a woman called Cassandra, holding twins she bore to the husband. Cassandra would like to come in. Maybe this piece of information was the trigger to the murder – at any rate, as her husband steps from the tub, she wraps a net around him as if it were a bathrobe, a net she’d made herself – Wait, are you hungry? Jade says. Come into the kitchen. Amid the chicken bones and a potato salad she says, All right, go on. You have a very nice mouth, I say. Go on, she says, the net, wraps it round him. OK. So the cousin comes in and takes two swipes with his sword, his two-edged sword, then the wife beheads the husband with her double-headed axe AHA! Jade says. Yes, I say. Then, splashed with his blood and bearing his head, she runs to the banqueting room where his followers are being slaughtered among the mixing-bowls. She has defended herself and her daughter – everything else is gloss at that point. Revenge, though sticky-fingered, is sweet. More chicken? Thanks. Her kids, a son and daughter, were sent away in case they grew up wanting to avenge their father. Which of course they do, Jade says. Yes. The surviving girl sends messages to her brother, who’s in another country: don’t forget: come home when you can, and avenge our father – Years pass. Grown up now, the boy goes to Apollo’s shrine for advice, and the oracle tells him to do just that. In the end, the boy does come back from exile, and kills his mother. A court case develops about the matricide, and this is where we come into it. See, up till now, the punishment for matricide has always been death. Lineage has been through the mother. But this play was written at a particular point in history. Or pre-history, Jade says. Right. So the court is held at the Shrine of Apollo, and Apollo himself is counsel for the defence. Alecto is given the job of public prosecutor – Your sister? Jade says. Yes. So the Magistrate calls up some citizens, and we hear the case. What were the mitigating factors? ‘The son was told to do it.’ His father’s ghost and ‘the oracle of Apollo himself’ told him to kill his mother. They made the rest of their case, mostly spurious, one of Apollo’s arguments being that it’s less bad to kill a woman than a man. We made some good arguments, but the vote for the boy to die was fifty-fifty. At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena! her garment having been kissed by many men or what, we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide meant the balance of power was shifting. I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was, it meant we’d be lying low for some time, centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps. In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies. The sound of the Barking Owl. And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered – Athena, your bird is telling you something! But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou on their way back to Greece for the Olympics. At the last minute they got a Virgin flight. It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess who helped tilt that power. Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling where men must be shown to be in control, and the best way to do that is to get a woman to do the job. Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess, to be kind and compassionate. To downplay the warlike. Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said, and perhaps flirt with her at the same time. For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment. Certainly she didn’t exact a death. In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said. Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said. We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do penance at the Temple of Artemis.

there’s nothing in my face. There is nothing in yours. What we have are called heads. They are nothing unless we kiss. Lips are wonderful. They are full of mechanoreceptors. In the Old World we all used to kiss and kiss. It was then that we did have faces. We had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft, downy hair. In the New World we stopped kissing. Those who were already here stopped. Those who came stopped. Now there are only four people who have heads that are also faces. They are an artist and three children for whom I have a face other than my hands.