To my best-kept, Quasimodo & Wheelchair, recast as an area of pastoral interest
by Mark Burnhope
[ poetry - november 10 ]
To my best-kept, Quasimodo
Like you, I have one eye
which is good, my other
a glossy, pussed growth,
a tumour. I could pluck it out,
say I have sinned Father,
seen far and away
too much of Esmeralda
through blue, stained-
glass panes: her sleight-
of-foot, bangled wrist, Notre-
Dame de Paris drowning
under her deft Paparuda.
But I won't, having seen us,
the cliché, escape the rain
to climb my stone belfry;
feel the pull and hear the toll
from which a music makes
straight once-wasted bone.
Wheelchair, recast as an area of pastoral interest
most evil scaffold, leveled
and controlled by the spirits;
wing-black, spectral white mass;
crass imposition upon the meadow
formed of iron-carbon alloy - steel -
and foam; folk dance of spoke,
wheel, tire, seat, the latter two
to which, flush out of the field,
the executed calf
and ewe contributed;
cold construction site;
social / medical model slag-
heap, and how for years
a man has worked on her,
Bach in the background,
bounding over the vales
