Spring Broadcast

Cotton-wool clouds
  in a shell-blue sky

plastic birds
  and somewhere lambs

the skipping rope's bow
  gyrates in light

in a dew-wet garden
  where you dance in playful curves

and the news on the kitchen radio
  drones with intermittent words

of sticks and stones and broken bones
  and names that cannot harm:

how Zawadi, at toy gun-point,
   pulled the skipping rope

to dangle her choking lamb;
   and parrots screeched

in the Devil's pet shop
   to see the Congo run amok.