[W T Clark]

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Left, which means "alone". Alone, because
what kind of person could have possibly lived
with me in language or the mask-blank wash
of God that was my habitat: my language?

If an Eve had existed would she have crept
around her drowned garden? could she have raked
bedraggled birds from their nests, as I must, to drop
a word's noose around each neck: could she have named them?

& if she was tempted: if she'd refused
that cruelty, what penalties would have been arranged?
Maybe I would have wept to hear her banished
from my kingdom to wander with the strange

tribes of the still-sighted — those few that God
in His all-knowingness had left to cross
& recross the flood in makeshift craft like words
of flesh still clinging to their skeletal corpse —

& stand with them & stare with her new sight
over the washed world to the darkness where
I laboured in the kingdom of the blind
that shall inherit the Earth that shall not have her.
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