It's a death march for the Saviour

Cross part raised, this thorn-crowned

body, while daubed wounds bleed,

reaches the church door accompanied

by a Flagellation and Glory band.

Now cameras flash, a staggering load

emerges and blood-red petals

come showering onto black candles

in a death march for the Lord.

Here comes a gold-crowned Virgin,

her float of white lilies and candles;

and so the hallelujah bundles

flung out from balconies begin.

Their shadows flick over the horde

of raised faces, on sunlit façades,

becoming a trampled ticker-tape parade's

litter for Jesus, the risen Lord.

Then as if for an end to atrocities,

El tres de Mayo, seventy years back,

the firecrackers in a salvo

air burst with flashes and smoke;

and, at that report, a white flock,

pigeons flee up to a palm bough

in Elche's Moorish public park —

as if for an end to atrocities.

But then a mulch of shrivelled leaves

corroborates the gloaming green

and polychrome, mock-gothic brickwork

of a knock-down home.

                                     Yes, it's like a crime scene,

this after-work light, dog tiredness,

now truck tracks through the lakeside mud

look like evidence, sign, or clue.

Geese stand their ground and hiss at us

here, where nature reserves

its last-but-not-least, as I suppose,

in an audit culture's redacted facts

and we foul our nests, are overseen

to be knowing not what we do.

Yet it's only as much as life deserves,

this aggressive-defensive contempt of us.

Eyes down, eyes fixed on tracks,

I wonder at goose squadrons

that nuzzle in rain-sodden grass.

'He's composing verses for the rhododendrons!'

No; but it's not a bad guess.

'I seem to be a petty usurer in a world manipulated largely by big usurers.' T.S. Eliot

Weather's conspiring, what do you know,

Those random vandals who had gone

and done harm to our gatepost

evaporate like a lost cry.

2

A drunk girl's tottering song in the street

amongst huddled couples goes by,

and, look, surviving violets

start from junk-strewn beds —

an all's-well-that-ends-well fleck in each eye.

3

Lilac and iris like a kept promise,

other bulbs stay underground

as protection for investments,

tubers, dried, being ready to shoot

up or down in price

with futures, tulip and stock manias.

4

Muddy footprints stiffen and crack.

Into the weather with fingers crossed

and recapitalized perforce,

they have to dupe the likes of us

with their last rights issues …

5 

You knew it! That lichen-foxed brickwork

has mortar flaking off it.

Back to partial disillusion

in the pink begonias,

I'm left to take my profit

with the losses, take them as I must -

their big idea in dissolution,

a drunk girl's tottering song in the street

or sort of self-disgust.