Two Poems by Mike Jenkins

After All This

After the cities and bullet-trains,

the salary-men and uniformed pupils

sleeping standing up going home

 

after the Buddhist temples adorned

in gold and even  the benches

with offerings of slotted coins

 

after the high-rise station

with garden on its roof

and a jazz band stage even

 

after the Zen temple

with its stone garden, water

meditating between angled wood

 

after Nagasaki and Hiroshima

peace-parks and flickering film

of black kites circling the ruins

 

after the volcano with acid lake :

vision of the earth’s core,

sulphur poisoning the air

 

after sleek, most sinuous horses

grazing in the fertile caldera ;

watching nauseous, their meat on skewers

 

after the bath-robe town

exhaling hot air from underground

and each cloth a cherry blossom

 

after the shrine to war-torturers

and the Emperor’s city-within-a-city,

a museum glorifying ‘the old lie’

 

after all this, no better sight

than my young daughter on the platform

in slippers and dressing-gown, waving me home.

 

 

 

‘I AM A NUMBER’

(for Omar Deghayes)

 

 

1.

 

I know

through the blur,

one moon   one star –

I am a number

 

too many zeros in this world –

the black hole

of my left socket

 

not the number

they knew me by,

those guards and bolt-hole

mouths spraying pepper

 

but a number recurring –

one I insist on,

the horizon from clifflines

 

a number they wanted

to gouge out –

I struggled to count

as my eyes turned liquid   turned blood.

 

  

2.

 

when I saw the landscape

of my face

what they had done to it

 

it was both east and west –

the starved desert of cheeks,

dead pit of one eye-ball

 

my nose a broken Tower of Babel –

even the wrinkles were treads

of boots of soldiers invading

 

 

when I saw this place

I knew I’d fought with hands and feet –

battlefield where I return at night

 

and now, the salty breeze

can soothe these spoil heaps,

the history of my skin

 

but I won’t rest as they defile others –

precious countries from the southern foothills

to headlands of the north.

 

 

Note – Omar Deghayes was imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo Bay. He was eventually released, with no evidence at all that he had been involved in any activities. He now lives near Brighton. ‘I am a number’ are his own words.