Three Poems

Killeen
Children's voices carry from the shore;
a high-tide line of jelly-fish - the true
sea-spawn, slime - lies waiting;
dangerous waters these, to venture into…

I stand on a high earth-bank
where winds come probing from the sea;
familiar and unknown worlds
here touch in the clay beneath me;

the children - as if all flesh were sin -
lie here, unnamed, their loud
guttural voices crying from the past:
they, too, were lifted out

from blood-confusion, but were put aside
here on the edge of our world, a few
sea-smoothed stones, like words, above them;
...