On Being Released Never counted the corridors, or hand-cuffed days they threw you down, disarmed. Nor held a gun in your life, and by the time they’d done with you, your sharp hand had been broken more than twice. You only ever wrote poems, before—not after. You love it now when the rain comes down like a guerilla raid, the plenty and its dying in such unsparing spray. Months and years barely alive under corrugated iron: splitting seams in the hot season, wan as opiation in the sopor of the rains. Everyone seemed reprogrammed, captor-captive in a mute guilt-making, each the guardian of the others’ compulsion to defeat. The drainpipes Morse-mad with Yeats, and Yevtushenko. Eventually some kind of history enters the common yard. Good karma? fortune? Just chance? Standing dumb-heroic in your doorframe, blocking the cameras, let loose into new life. The interviewers who ask, How did you survive … Continue reading On Being Released