wordsout by godfrey rust
The
sailing of the ark < 2
of 45 >
2
We've
reached life's middle ground,
surprised we got this far without being
found
out, and still wondering
what it is we're going to do when we grow up; yet
I'm
here somehow with all the regular
stuff—
job, wife, mortgage, bank statements and bills,
bathroom
ceiling needing papering,
two children to be got to bed by eight—while
the
man I might have been digs with
his bare hands
in the ruins of a bombed-out house in Basra
or
lies on the ground in Africa with ribs
like a birdcage stretched across with parchment
and
staring eyes fixed, I think, on something other
than a choice of curtains and the current mortgage rate.
Written at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.
.