In Northern France

It was the Von Richthofen flying circus. They were coming in low. They filled the sky from end to end. Someone on the ground was shouting- maybe he was giving orders- but I couldn't hear the words because of the drone of all those machines. It was like the moment in a dream when the supernatural stalker has your back against the wall and there's no possible way of wriggling free. The time I spent seeing those skeletal forms imprinted on the china sky- the time between the first warning and the start of the strafing- was absolutely the most terrifying of my life.

As I Sailed

Finlay the poet was born on a schooner
(His dad ran rum in the dry Bermoothes)
He was my friend for a brief, brief while-

The sundial that he made for us
Has its gnomon shaped like a bending sail.

What I wrote him was preachy. He never wrote back.
No loss of friendship hurt me as much
Till Snakey ditched us, our very best friend-
Our all but daughter.

The wind fills the sail.
It fills it with nothing, with nothing but force.

White bellied sail like cumulus-
Like a girl near term.

Eliza Carthy
Is singing of Kidd, most famous of pirates.
He burned and he robbed and he murdered, he says,
As I sailed, as I sailed.

As if in a dream, in a dream of sailing.

The sails go up river. The sails go down river-
War ship and lighter and pleasure craft-
Past Kidd in his cage on the gibbet at Wapping.

She stamps as she sings and it brings her to tears.