At my first? Water.

Red scream-water of a mother’s pain

and the full-brim belly of the sea between.

Obscured child of the final fogs.

A drizzle-damped London baptism.

Earth of my parent’s famished story,

never my home but my only home.

Slack-jawed speech and sign of the cross.

Within, a petty civil war.

A sort of megalithlic mind is flinted

even before the years of jumped-up tumbledown.

New air to breath of the big sky

across the run-away main. Soon runs out.

Fish on the bank with gaping gills. Same eyes as mine.

Behold, I carry my cross into the Americas. Unrequested and anyway no-one’s looking.

It’s all been seen before here.

Fire is the best of it. Setting the heather blazing before I go.

At least that’s what I say but never do.

But beneath my slough the unuttered rage of the biting baby

threatens the happiness of the other animals.