The Greek Beach
Brighter than a full moon on the sea,
their acetylene torches cut the night.
Scrapped hulls scream as they’re born again.
Masked men tear wrecks they joyrode ten years back,
cut up truck hoods and corrugated sheets,
hammer spent shell cases, weld armour plating
and rails from a disused train track
to the steel girders that once held our temples up.
Sparks glisten above their sweat, speakers thump the dark.
Shifts change, sit by fires forest-sprung beside the waves,
drink beer from cans they send shivering beyond the blaze,
singing themselves hoarse as they watch the shape grow.
Along their lines, burning tyres gild the night,
lighting the captives staked before their gates.
Flares falter above the treeless plain’s
decade of vultured dust – its ranked shadows
of fear and pain, its rat-filled pyres, its toxic
river running scum under our silent walls
from where we’ve watched the world fall.
But, at dawn, their gunship rotas abandon
djins of sand to follow the last transport’s oil-rich wake
away from the myth of this war.
Picking our way, in peace, through land mines,
sump oil dumps and the mournful echoes
of warning-skulled barrels half-buried in the dunes,
we reach the stink of latrine pits hung with perimeter wire,
its razored helix threading prayer-flagged rags of plastic
from the beach to the scorched horizon’s broken glare.
Cutting it, we shy round a booby-trapped cuddly toy,
scattering the crows and strays that scavenge among
still-warm fires whose crack whores wake to a nightmare
of gull cry and our madman’s unbridled warnings echoing
along the shore where we drift, like litter or lost children,
beneath the huge, iron-headed indifference of our gift.
Craig Dobson’s had work in Agenda, Antiphon, Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, The London Magazine, Magma, Neon, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, Stand, The Rialto and Under The Radar.