are soldiers, their boots as yet unblemished.

One of them cuts the ninth man’s hair and beard.

Though his prayer shawl is trailing on the ground,

his waistcoat is firmly fastened, watch chain

still in place. He is standing stolidly

as in a queue. His eyes only we see.

He looks through the lens with – not fear – contempt.

The burning of children, of millions deceives.

‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem…’

Europe was a river of broken ice,

Russia a mouth widening to a

frozen sea. GULAG was permanent winter.

Innocent, we had traced railways to

romantic ends. The atlas of knowledge showed

obscured crimes, its charts the colours and scale

of blizzards. A new world had been shaping.

Multitudes were shunted across nations.

A chronicle of whispers is the pure

saga, epic of the supreme fiction,

where history is lost, where ten million

lives are broken like glass.

Anne Frank

The canal dapples the office ceiling.

Upstairs, the fugitives are still as dust.

A siren unpeoples the city.

Into the waiting sky, with the raucous gulls

and the chestnut, her words like breathing…Her life

has turned, beyond all her desires, so

brutally to art…They packed and waited:

beyond, a locked compartment to themselves

and telephone wires curvetting by -

then countrysides of shuddering, noisome wagons.

She died alone. Her father made her grief,

her love public as Europe: spoke her words

into the empty sky.

Dee Estuary from Gayton Sands. © SCES 2009.

Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground -

a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass

like early snow. A navigable channel

is impossibly distant, far-off as

childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.

Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low

as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this -

ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,

teasing out hills, a slow explosion

of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s

reticular forests, a homely,

mackerel sky caught in another’s vision -

ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,

pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape

and sense of time.

Towing the continent,

hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past

stretches like a landscape from this instant,

encompassing it. The oneness of things,

their disparateness I taste like blood:

the jest at the heart – being here and now

who could so easily have been elsewhere

or no one.

Oblivious of ironies,

soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice

was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in

imagining’s ponderous white oceans.