Two Poems

Europa
for Lindsay and Phoebe Clare Clarke
 
The sun stands naked
out of the shade, in a space
of poppies and fig-trees,
       an empty space
where Greeks and Romans
built their worlds.

                Over all
the breath of the bull-god,
the sear of lightning that burned
a blackness into the light.

What havoc it caused -
columns, sarcophagi,
a headless female statue,
the dome of St Titus,
       emptied,
...