[Here is the third tranche of Poem 17. It contains Section 4 and Song #4. This poem is exhausting me. There are so many ghosts in it and it is so dark and sad.]

IV Bangers

Back home, Mike takes it out on the car,

kicking the weak metal panels in and firing a shot

into that bald tire. Mum and neighbors shout

about the racket: cars backfiring, that old eyesore

of a clapped out banger parked in the drive,

the noise of rows. Mike remembers

sausages popping in the saucepan

and rockets going up on Bonfire Night

and bangers thrown to the ground to explode

amusingly around the feet of fearful girls.

He unloads a volley of shots into the bloody car

and sets off down the street armed and alone.

 

Song #4 Child Auto Accident Victims Lullaby

 

The wan little ghosts hang their yellow ribbons around

traffic-lights and trees,

crossroads, hedges, suburban setbacks,

bus-stops across the road from pubs and schools, zebra and pelican crossings,

hard shoulders, sloping driveways, country roads

in the middle of nowhere, singing polyphonic threnodies

through bloodless Cupid’s bow lips for lost lives.

The cherry and the apple blossom

falls about them like a vehicular glass of snow. Blood-

stained glass windowing our wing mirrors with guilt and grief.

Like frost, they are there every morning the mercury drops,

like a dew of tears every summer dawn, damning us.

No anti-freeze can melt them away.

Singing us to sleep with their sweet salt song of tears,

they blight fertile ground with corpses too soon put into the earth,

by haste, engines, wheels, machinery, gears, cogs, hub caps, gas, ball bearings,

glove compartments, sunshield mirrors, spark plugs, bald tires spun off into the air.

All sorts of bric-a-brac

they bring back from the grave as evidence, jangling

like the trinkets of gypsy children, bidding us with their black eyes

bid them due process and due farewell.