In June a friend asked me to write a poem featuring the word 'shawl' as one of five challenges, and I wrote this.

Talion

Let me explain the man
who appeared a month into the witchhunts,
while the fog was gathered on the barrows,
and you were in the hospice, engulfed in spasms.

I remember how he got everybody to reach for their shortwave radios
and the night became filled
with Morse clicks
and patriotic cantos

while the grasslands were swept of objects.

Jaw locked, you managed:
“how beautiful were its teeth before”
then merged again into turbulence.
I used your shawl
to swab the skerry of spittle from your chin
and admired from the window sill
the villagers assembling
a militia
on the paddocks below.

Then: a month of fires.

They prepared him a home
on the tallest mound,
rooms cut from blast rock and cedar,
where he sat with a flute of sherry
well fucked and plump
and commanding the hills and snow plains
all the way to the borderland shanties.

Posters of your delicate face
with the words
We Shall Avenge
fading on the roadsides
shuttereyed and pale.

The purple arc of dusk on the sierra
where they emptied the murdered
into canyons
and strung the raped by their throats, in trees
bald and bloated and eyeless.

O Girl, it’s darkness, and
I have run out of accustomed prayers.