My Father Meets the Shepherd Boy

                    behind enemy lines in Iraq, my father’s refusal to
                    shoot a young shepherd boy led to his eventual capture
                    and torture at Abu Ghraib prison

the river widens its jaw to greet them mouths
busy with old names and bloodfeathers they talk
of consequence the way one torture follows
another the way men leak when they open there
are bodies pinned by the sun’s heavy shoulders
more ungathering beneath the sand but the boy
remains two men ageing for one another he could
have pulled the trigger but some innocence
is too obvious they talk like this in dreams my 
dreams carried in the night’s cupped hands
they finally share a language my father holds
metal in his palms like a god the boy kneels
there is still so much mercy to be given we find
the sand in everything	




FATHER / SON / ORANGE TREE / OAK

years have passed quickly,
the orange tree emerging

from the tilth like a word
whispered, then spoken,

then sung. a branch
and then a branch shingled

pink, bud breaking beyond
the midrib, orphan

of an orphan, son reaching
out into the world. 

somewhere in the west
of england, a man

dismembers a corpse
of oak. his hands

and then his hands
carving, cutting a new

future into ageing
body, orphan

of an orphan, father reaching 
out into the world. 




Royal Albion Hotel Fire, July 2023
          
          The Regency Society of Brighton and Hove described
          the building as of ‘unusual significance’
          -- BBC News, 19 July 2023

the hotel baptised
in amber proving water	curse
stolen from the god’s unwatched
hands                          the building aches
to return the blueprint
but nothing can be unlearnt	not enough
to cling to innocence
by the second day only pockmarks
of yellow remain                     resisting
the last of the city’s dark
from the street               the air feels
like a body
                   and so i hold it
long enough to know	the heat
of suffering                                            that knowledge
can empty us all

Blake Auden is a British poet based in Brighton, UK. He is a winner of the Letter Review Prize for Poetry and the Button Short Form Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the MONO Poetry Prize, the AUB International Poetry Prize, the Creative Writing Ink Poetry Prize, the Poetry Kit Spring Poetry Prize and the Black Eyes Publishing Poetry Prize. His work has been featured in The Banyan Review, Letter Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, MONO, The Tomahawk Creek Review, Book Riot and The Write Launch, and he has been interviewed in Forbes, Metro, Coast Magazine, The Bookseller, The Economic Times and Authority Magazine. His new book, The Gods We Made, will be released in November 2023 by Thought Catalog. 

                                            www.blakeauden.com