3 Sonnets

Profit and Loss

They made a golf course where the barley grew:
golden fields of grain no longer paid;
the surplus market's subsidies withdrew,
so fairways carve to greens where barley swayed.
And now the houses top the hills: their roofs
triangulate the sky where barley stood,
where bolting hares surprised my cut and swathe;
where long ago, I watched you climb and wave.
The land I knew is never-never land,
where golden boys go gladly hand-in-hand.
The commerce I embrace was always there
in undulating fields that hid the hare.
Economies must house the working state
and, like the swallow, people too migrate.

Topiary

Today at work, they put out the topiary.
Last week the concrete blocks were placed:
a hulking semi-circle of stone security
to make a no-go plaza . It's only
now a vital sense of change impacts:
this leafy line of clipped container plants
inducing double-takes, a heightened scrutiny.
They gesture business-as-usual: flying planes
from A to B, commercialising skies.
But mostly, fronting with fragile art the random
stroke of chaos: the sculptor's forms and shapes
deny the senseless blast of flaming car bomb;
co-opted, they tremble to counter suicides
as Dresden china or Nero's violin.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

Caravaggio, didn't you kill someone
in a brawl once? I also read you swaggered,
cocksure - cocksure; and from
the way he prods and probes the open severed
flesh, bloodless, undeniably cut,
your arrogant Thomas still seems to stipulate
the terms of belief. Unbelieving what
his eyes behold; bound by touch and sensate
apprehension. Knowing what he'd know:
the room should shake, the breaking heart explode
beyond the paint, a kind of madness grow
and grip him comprehending what he owed.
The measure of his crying heart's relief
as loud as life and equal to my disbelief.