Exile

There is no room in this world for my children.
One went to the farthest edge, and died.
She wrote of home—this place—in her journal
But never visited again. The time
They stay at leisure is not very long.

For the three others, something remains hidden;
The finished picture has not yet unfolded,
But the signs are there—there is an internal
Closure, a sense of distance, which confine
The shared endeavours where they may belong.

That after twenty years I’m still a stranger
In this place, where the connections are so close,
Implies an alienation—not of danger
or difference, but a lack of purpose.

Ornamental Cherries

The blossom of the flowering cherry trees
Alternatively pink or white, and dense
(On the up-swept branches all along the row)
Jostles like adolescents, full of life,
Yet skirting certain limits cautiously—

– 103 –

Recalling, in the way it seems to tease
And trail and then demur in diffidence,
the all too easily extinguished glow
Of youthful zest, and seeming to transmit
An almost human poise and buoyancy—

Just as the gleam of multi-coloured leaves
In autumn, on these same branches, assents
Tacitly to its own passing—and with
The same pathos, if not such poignancy.

Sentence

The last ‘ex-patient’ from here who committed
Murder was Dr X’s deaf-mute, who was
Already subject of debate admitted
As being ‘mentally disordered’ just because
He hadn’t ‘heard’ what they had been saying to him.

Oh! I know you’ll say that conceptualisation
Is severely impaired in congenital
Deaf-mutes, that a valid categorisation
Was made for what concerns the due judicial
Process—I doubt if that was plain to him.

What happened was that he was led to believe
Himself an ‘outlaw’, having no remedies
Or support—we’d have done better to relieve
His loneliness, not bandy categories.