Five Poems

Spoils

Our taxi sails on an open road
where they have paved the wilderness -
unending hilly scrub-land

that later I look out across,
as night falls, from the balcony
of a house in a new town,

spotting arc-lights between the sky
and the next hill, watched in my turn,
while masts of concrete and steel

frame building-sites against the moon,
darken themselves, and then grow tall,
taking their certain bearings from

a fenced road to Jerusalem:
late, and better late than soon.


Syrian
...