Poem 199

Jack was an old guy I worked with at the Post Office – he told me when he was sixteen he was a guard at Featherston (doing the sums that actually makes him only as old as I am now) …

… the man across the road from us in Rotorua had been a P.O.W. in Changi – lost a leg and a whole lot more …

( I like the double meaning of whose calculator … the poem has two parts because I wanted to do more than just let the question hang … keep your eye on the sparrow as the song says … )

The Sparrow

i

That the Japanese were cruel
                                                      says Jack during smoko
was proved in Featherston Camp
where they would sit laughing
round a sparrow tied by a leg
to the wire

                          I remember
                          perched on the woodbox
                          the man across the road
                                 licking a rollie
                         the day his WWII crutch wore through
at the thumbprint
us kids taking turns limping
digging the broken end
                                          into the dirt
his stump twisted fingers the shiny
burns

and I've seen the snapshot
the lanky Australian pushed kneeling
on the beach
                        before a compact man
round glasses family sword
reflecting Pacific
sunlight

before them we stand guilty
of our atrocities
      getting soap in the bathwater
      taking out Nagasaki
            when Hiroshima had made the point
      our size
      our crudeness
      this certain long range delicacy
      with the button

how do we add it up
and whose calculator do we use?

      a city countersunk
      baggy shorts and shoulder blades
      emptying blood
             into sand
       one bird fluttering
       in a quiet town …


ii

… one bird fluttering
tears this fence line free
      fusing its thin muscle
to the sun

ring the bells let the children
out of school

       in red pulled dirt
of postholes men cry praise
in all their tongues
                                  for the victory