As_I_Said_epub-67.html

I can see him coming back from the clinic,

diphtheria jab sprouting from shoulder,

Jew-boy face rosy, eyes crinkled

against the soft sunshine of an April day.

When Herods are in power, of course,

babies can’t keep a smile off their face.

It’s hotting up. The light goes on in the office.

The prince of pockmarks plants his jackboots on our fate.

Picking out clots of Jewish names from his Russian list.

Coupling up trains in his dead-of-night marshalling yard.

So why be injected with weighty Slavonic wings?

For the likes of us, what’s the point of a span so broad?

So tears must be choked back on this maiden flight;

after all, overhead – homely to sense but harder to see –

there are chimneys and roofs, and sparrow-lime

on the cruppers of those triumphal steeds.