Reading 1 - Harpoon
Harpoon
The images you will find, brave-flapping;
Through squally sentence spray, storm-blown;
Lyricism, like plaintive gulls lighting;
Dead sky, around the waste-land tip;
Are the tortured dreams of beauty,
Dance music themes that all-night play,
Till dawn’s sweet compassion, soft-buttered
On a skin’s mourning shore, breaks;
And a nurse’s kindness, breathed bone-marrow deep,
Bathes nascent gaping wounds, stabbing-cruel,
A world’s suffering, sour, cradled in our arms;
And when, in some faraway and far-flung foreign land,
A happy and handsome refugee boy, smiles
Only seconds before, his precious blood,
Caught in the crossfire, feeds
The rusting-red hard and dusty ground;
And when, bitten by the broken beauty,
Savaged and left to rot by the stinking cruelty marching-on,
A thin trail of tears, roll
In ill reflection, down
Your angry-young choked and bitter cheek;
That’s the time,
When some spiritual harpoon strikes home
Deep within your stir and bone,
That a fierce resolve is born,
To fight it all,
In the fire of a human soul.
