1
pain wins
when there’s nothing like it
even remembered pain

when nerves win
even mind is made puppet
hung from dull hands

when there’s no
mind’s eye beneath the skin
beneath the tender surfaces in
this hemisphere this
state there in self’s
last site without senses
knowledge even become pain

final broken turncoat thing
final double agent double
dealing thing pain’s place

pain replaces

2
a flash of blood
as if forced through the space
between a mirror’s glass
and a mirror’s silver flooding
any image any place

cerebral irritation

3
Sunday:
church bells boys
share slick bikes limes
grow leaves like
hair opening in water

my friends in cars
with cheap wine and picnics
my friends in rooms
with books and pictures

does any
one does any
thing know this
is over?

4
i picture his hands
i picture the doctor’s hands
like cat’s paws
claws withheld and soft
as tongue on teeth
trying kind as a dog’s lick

needing for fingers
flies’ feet that refuse
to dent your pain’s meniscus
failing

and the kind cruelty
shouting through his fingers
with you out of earshot sealed
below compassion’s surface

urgent
losing
touch

From the way the skull was moving
it had seemed that it was split in half.

by keith jafrate

Blair Peach was killed by a member of the Special Patrol Group of the Metropolitan Police at an anti-National Front demonstration in Southall, west London in April 1979. i wrote this poem about a year after the events, after reading a newspaper report of the inquest into his death. the two phrases in italics are quotations from the evidence given to the inquest by the doctor who examined Blair when he was admitted to hospital. given that the litfest commission required us to think about what was worth remembering, i thought it was a good time to re-member this poem and Blair Peach’s murder by the state, for which no one was ever charged.

A slightly longer version of the poem first appeared in Stride magazine, and it came out in my book War Poems which was published by Slow Dancer Press in 1987.