The Building Site
I found a confessor amid working men, conduit for Truth
Their tattoos say mother, there is nothing about father
but in the roiling brick dust, a tangle of scaffold poles
& ladders, there is little need for more men. God knows
we need a feminine touch, a Madonna, even an angel.
Each summer I sweat it out, make tea — a newcomer’s
duty — & carry full hods up ladders.
Faster, always faster, the sole bricklayer’s satisfaction the race
against one another & the jibes meted out to the boss’s son
as shame & rage gurgle in my throat like a geezer ready to blow—
Your boss is not my father! I was forced to forget him when
a new king was installed, a lion who would otherwise eat
his cubs, this one who gives you orders. In the shadow kingdom
truth is forbidden. We live our lives from Year Zero taught
the past is a place of shame only ground of forgotten men.
I was eight at the new marriage celebrations.
But in great clouds of dust & shame & rage & banter
there formed a kind of initiation. I felt salvation on the way.
Finally I chose a man called Bill — the painter — as confessor
because I liked him & because he hated the same man for his own
reasons. When all imploded, I never worked a building site again.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
