Jon Silkin

A dog-lion’s haunched triangular fury guards the dead. He says, ‘several things:

first I bite, then in death I guard you.’ ‘Besides, I don’t want it,’ I said. ‘Then forgive me.’

‘I’ll guard my own death,’ I say. So then he bites me. Meanwhile a little swooning

in the blood. I tell this dental fool, ‘I am the right, and...

A Gypsy Moth holds a castle of bruised rose in its sights, the engine beating like a moth’s wings, but the moths beat against or tumble over the walls, across beams of light, on glass, and in the windows – their sensors, their furred heads, winged bodies with a burning sense of the bulbs naked over the readers. Lightly they wipe their webbed flesh on our cheekbones, and we imagine...

In a Trailways, shaking over red clay, wild poor shapes hang in a sulky wind of glazed polythene. As we start, a child bellows softly, she mews at her mother’s breasts pressed up into the v of an ill-made blouse. The gaze is cheerful, her repose her daughter’s sleep, father unfolding in it like the soiled shapes of duster he cannot sell.

The planted rows, the dead all men, their...

For gas the house waters carbide, often meagre for burning, though our lungs cough up a shred of acid that we sicken on. Up at

plastered stone, flaky and gravid, the sheep butt: smudged with an orange dye wool inside mist wastes at the mothy house. Then gas heaves. Quick, turn the spiggots, across their limp flow, igniting this powdery whiteness damped to gas, a flame that looms, raising a...