They stood the sheep-stealer in the rain
for one hundred lashes.
I’m being cut through, he said,
when they laced past his spine.
He was his own defense:
We’d been so hungry
my wife ate our
daughter’s thigh,
just dead from famine fever.
His wife sat in the, tongue
tip working her cracked lips.
She had not broken British law.
No law against eating Irish meat.
It had not worked, this world as given,
so the girl just died, so gently
they thought it was more sleep,
for now they slept at mealtimes instead of eating.
It is the history we never knew
not the history we have forgotten
that makes us stupid. It is the god
who never came to us who never visits again.
For here is spring grass, children under the hose,
here are trashcans heavy as bodies,
and streets newly paved, almost soft,
yet somewhere in a hedgerow
that man still crawls toward a white flock
that is almost motionless in the dusk.
He holds a flail wrapped in a shirt.
He must hunt a beast that will not flee,
or fight, cut his own red mark
in the white wool and the town will see
how he had to stop the hunger.
Soon it will rain again here, warm as blood.