IAIN BRITTON
PROFANITIES
a pencilled figure
walks the tightrope of morning lines
expanding in the heat /
a guttural voice
whispers profanities / your
father lives a question
follows you about the garden
& you wonder why the sunflowers
are flopping in the midday stillness
a boy has set his
school books on fire
what’s left
spills into the river
you read the hawk’s language / how it
scratches crucifixes in the sky
shatters blue glass
into heavy rain
then swoops down on a flat horizon /
the boy
stares at a face
dug into the river’s mud
*
time’s transparency
sharpens its gaze / you
enter the green vaulted
crescendo
of a morning’s belling mayhem
you pass middens
of plastic bags
wrappers
bottle tops
charred bones
you look for evidence
of men & women
crushed in grass
*
last night
your father was thinking about
the kaleidoscopic effects
of translating
- what to choose
- what not to choose
*
our profanities take us
to the black robes of a desert
to vanishing islands
the chemically-fuelled voice
of a dying singer / a bullet’s
journey through a girl’s head
they take us to the rock
of Hatupatu
your father says a lot
translates too much
*
the boy
skips stones
across the river
counts
his lives
on his fingers
your father walks
into another question / full-on /
& resumes digging his garden /
clearing weeds / he feeds his dream
of perambulating through wire netting
he stops at the gate
black-backed gulls
fly off with artefacts
which have lost their glitter
Copyright © Iain Britton 2015
Since Iain Britton's appearance in Molly Bloom 3, work by him has appeared in The Fortnightly Review, Shadowtrain, Stride, Litmus, E.ratio, Posit, Free Verse, Cordite and Contrappasso. New work will soon be
published by Plume, Antipodes and the Harvard Review.
