Considering good and evil

Death had just polished off the last sponge-finger
when he had an idea for a verse: chewing the dirt beneath
his nails he scribbled the words down lazily—or spontaneously,
whichever way you prefer it—as he looked out
over the clean imagined fields of Hampstead Heath.

Death, of course, had absorbed the pacifist lessons
from the poems of World War One; some of the lines
he’d even memorised, and the one about coughing up blood
in a green sea of gas he liked so much that he’d do it
at birthdays and weddings, at Christmas, on Valentine's.

Leafing through the paper’s pages wearily,
the Sunday news wasn’t all that he’d hoped
in the first days of a fresh campaign. No elitist,
it wasn’t for nothing that they called Death the Great Leveller.
But nor did he think himself unpatriotic, or a defeatist,

for though he’d violently opposed the war of liberation,
he’d supported it too, wishing the troops well: all views
to him were an equally valid expression of subjective
experience. (Later, behind the gauze of a confessional,
he’d earwig a soldier’s session for strategies or clues.)

So if Death is a tank commander, he’s also at home
in jeans and slippers, or propped up on a study chair.
That’s why, when he entered the ancient city, it was no surprise
as he removed his goggles and dusted himself off
that it was his own strong hand that shook his welcome there.

After all, wasn’t he born here, where mum and dad
first pinched the fruit from the master’s private trees?
That landed them in no end of trouble—ie with sex
and death (a "mixed blessing"), an eternity of hard labour;
but also little naughty Cain, and Abel, so eager to please.

How shabby Eden was looking now—
and a lot less lush than he remembered; for all that,
he noted the hilltop palace he’d somehow managed to wangle,
complete with Olympic-size pool and good views
over the arid southern plains, the ascetic Ziggurat.

Now Death stands up, scratches his bony behind,
looks in the mirror. Sensing he’s lost some weight
he adds vitamins to a mental post-it. Into the absence
where moments before had been the last sponge-finger
he conjures up a new last piece on a simple stoneware plate

and, scoffing the cake down greedily, he sweeps
the crumbs to the floor so his wife won’t see them;
returns to the papers, where the problem of good
and evil just makes his eyes glaze over into two marbles:
these roll off down Skull Hill, looking out for a stratagem.

(April 2005)