The Billions

At the whizz of a door screen
moorhens picking through our garden
make it by a squeak into the dam
and breasting the algal water

resume their gait and pace on
submerged spectral feet, and they nod
like that half-filled Coke bottle
we saw in the infant river

as it came to its affliction
in the skinny rapids. There
it made a host of dinky bows,
jinked, spun and signalled

till it was in the calm again.
Riding wet in a wide reach of glare
it made us think of icebergs
towed to a desert harbour

for drink and irrigation,
stranded incongruous wet mountains
that destroy the settled scale there,
but, imported in a billion pieces

that’s how the coke world is.
And though, as immemorially,
all our dream-ships come,
and go, to Cervix Paradise,

now when day puts us ashore
we walk on gritty ice
in wideawake cities
with tower flats and smog horizon

and there we work, illusionless,
scared lest live rhyme with naive
till the evening lights come on.
That’s the Enlightenment: Surface Paradise.

It cures symptoms, and is fun,
but almost any warmth makes floes
those caught on them must defend
as the inner fields expand,

floes with edges like a billion.
Strange, that wanting to believe
humans could fully awaken
should take away the land.