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Lamb, I have seen you from trains. I have seen you as I walked through fields. You looked back at me, raised your left hoof towards me in a delicate way. Lamb, I have found your winter curls by the roadside, on thorns and on barbed wire.
Lamb, who exalts what the world gets wrong its failings, its struggles, honourable lamb feel for us.
Lamb, all winter I wear black to absorb the sun. Red is not as good at this. It is only for inside. Lamb, my mother had a dream. The whole family lived separately in sheds in the back yard. It was dark and cold. When we went to find each other, we weren’t there.
Lamb, who exalts what the world gets wrong heals wounds, smooths troubles, loving lamb feel for us.
Lamb, these derelict testaments are stained. They’re cased in walls of clay. We cannot reach them. We are damp and raucous, our marsh overgrown. The trees under our pavements are dead. The stairs, by which you left to sail up river, lead nowhere. Lamb, why do we fear ourselves?
Lamb, who exalts what the world gets wrong crowns hags, creates doubt, fragrant lamb give us peace.
I wake where I was sleeping in my room but the walls are gone and all I see are night shapes twisting away from the bed. They're brambles, I think, yes, they are, and in full fruit and now I can feel the night's a warm one and now I can feel there is no breeze.
Trying to find my bearings by the moon and the brown-mirrored rear of the department of health always to its right which has gone, like the fence to the park, like the park and the flats and now I can see the shapes of out-houses and now I can see the moon on glass.
I get up and not finding my slippers, walk on through grass, which in part is boggy which is not such a bad thing and as it's a full moon I see the flowers, folded for sleep, Viola tricolor, tickle me fancy, heartsease, jump up and kiss me.
This is not the leper house, it's not here that lesions creep through a bright red haze.
That's on the other side - where they've put builders'-huts over the football pitch.
What is this haze - smudging out from the blotch to form a margin? It's red as in heart not iron
or blood, a red too Victorian to stand for this place, too red for the likes of us.
It’s foolish to think there’d be no conflict the scaffold closes in on us, blocks
the light-stream and it doesn’t rain. Our pansies are dead. They will not regenerate.
The cold new doors come: too fast, too heavy and we’re stuck behind them, eye to little eye,
stomach driven, planning our resistance; but the new windows will not break
and we’ve forgotten how to destroy steel. The landladies talk of how nice it will be
how much we’ll like it when its done. On Fridays we blow their dust off our tools
I rub my saw, my iron mallet, my neighbour shines up his hammer.
The empty baskets and window boxes avoid our eyes. Yes, we’re waiting, we are waiting.
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