JOHN CLAMP X
ROZ KEEP
SUSI AND THE FOREST GHOST
For Susi, a refugee.
On her sixth birthday
Being her grandma’s favourite
Susi got a bullock.
This was her charge, her ward.
First out of the school gate
She skeltered, the wind of the plateau
Lifting her on home to embrace
Her duty and her heart-bursting joy.
Leading him out of the village
Carefully past the slit trench
Susi kept scanning the dusty path ahead
For bushthorns.
During air raid drills
The class would skip laughing
At the crisp chill
Of an azure winter morning.
Days before that fighting season ended
Came the planes, over
The shoulder of the scarp
Tracking the spooling road to Mong Hsat
Angry black knots of death
Low and hard and roaring.
No skipping this time just hurried feet
Silenced by fear
The class made it into the trench
Unbreathing.
Taking the steps, Susi glanced up the road.
The dark thing just dropped
Calved
Off the belly of the aircraft
A sight that smeared her forever.
Just two killed that day
Susi’s bullock ripped out his peg.
Weeks later, Susi weeping still scoured
The valley forest
She found only ghosts.
Her grandma, rocking her to sleep
As she fevered in her grief
Whispered, over and over
‘You are not to blame.’
Just a year later
Trekking over the cold mountains
As she fled from the soldiers
Susi wished only that her beautiful bullock
Could be stepping surely beside her.
FORGETTING SENHOUSE
Eyeless sentinel of the southern approach,
Skirts shucked by the rolling tides of aeons,
They named you for a marauding mariner.
A knight no less, a man of parts:
A commander of squadrons quartered
In the queen’s new colony, back
In the salad days, when the main island’s
Fragrant flanks were virgin green.
He was a white devil then, lashing the shanghaied coolies,
Opening the estuary like a sardine tin,
Rolling up the spearmen of the Qing. His marines,
Their Bakers barking, reduced the native forts to black
Opium ash.
He, though honoured in the list, was a mere sand grain
Here, in the liquid labial flesh of the open-mouthed
Firth. He sucked the living out, and filled the shell with
His bloody mercantile imperative: buy or die.
His men were brutes, all flintlock butts and bayonets,
Easy, this slaughter in a sea of shot and sweat
Their wake a roil of crimson tidal swell.
He died diseased (the place got to him)
Demanding interment in Macao,
Never thinking the islands would count for much.
Yet while this pluton sleeps, he’ll weather away:
His stone marker will be flushed dust,
Pale grains on the black sand beach
Stamped by tiny toddler feet
Into a print of tomorrow’s today.
Then, and then, that fever of forgetting will
Break like spray on these pink granite shores.
