Who Will Bury The Dolls?

A people have been hacked, hewed,
shaped, chiselled, filed, sharpened
kept cocked in the chamber
between hammer and flash;
Dolls of the line, Kali-like
children’s toys,
her girdle of cut-off hands,
her bracelet of skulls
now a handsome set of grenades.

Between the boot and the mounds of carcasses
bloated with gas stomps the goodly peasant
tramping down what the supervisor insists
be called no name but “dolls”
and the ships carrying desperate threads
to port after port and back to the scissors.
No port to land, no land to settle. What irony!

The reason why there’s a day of solidarity
is because there is none (couldn’t you guess?)
Not with those who look the other way
Not with those who preen and weigh their golden hair
—superpersons to the rescue (moralswise)—
burnishing their bona fides like drunks and their stories
stomping nothing but audience:
the peace- and warfulness that passeth underCanading.
Primitive nations at war? need the latest technology? Candu!

Similarly, the humiliation. Embarassment:
No place so no peace for the weary travellers
and our little dolls all grown up now.
Vegetables and bitter herbs all blown to bits
Raisins and virgins raining all day up in heaven.
We should hardly be surprised
—The objects were created to specifications
to finish the job.

But who will bury the dolls?
Will it be he who wanders
up and down and through
all the earth, the ungrateful one?
I see him now, two-faced and two-sided.
On one side hangs the figure,
the pièta, crowned by thorns, his cross
dug deep into the earth. In that earth,
rooted on the other side
upward begins to twist the trunk
of a hornéd gloating goat,
his eyes gleaming with satisfaction
as saint after saint
writhes against the ropes on their wrists
the piercing arrows of love and hate
and the wooden stakes that rend them.

Purple and yellow of bruises,
branches and needles banging,
the sky a dull ruddy anti-glow.

Eerily calm, Medea stalks the stage
a child under each arm
their shirts soaked in blood.

Son enters stage left

DAD

“Where have you been?”

SON

“Fuck off!”

DAD

Why can’t you be like your brother?


Like Job?

Like Israel?

Seething.