Philip Gross
Melt Line
On one hand: Let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
of the death of… (things
in general, the seasons.) On the other
let’s stomp,
let’s puddle-slosh
like toddlers, drop to our knees in it,
icky-fingered in the particular
wonder of new mud
the melting snow
discloses. From sandpapery chill
to slush, to slump
in dark-dribbling scars,
earth wakes, feeling its body again,
cramped from long numbness: Spring
which is also
a slow un-forgetting
of impacted pains, a spillage
undigested, chunks
of tyre-tread ruts
incriminating as a fingerprint, rust,
wire, shrapnel; deeper, mammoth’s
death-throe,
last meal in its craw,
the plague bacillus, morning-after breath
of peat bog,
and the ancient sleepers
dragged out of their dreamtimes – what,
again? – and all the wounded histories,
stuck clockwork
of parade-ground strutting,
flags, flags, uniforms… And mudslides,
oh, and hunger
and the children of hunger
gazing at the roadside – they will not
forgive us – from the churned fields,
barefoot, mud-
coloured and mud-crusted
as if new-created like Adam all over again
just waiting
for the word this Spring breathes
into them, and what will they say then?