from Knight

Sword

He marches into the yard and calls all comers

in a flurry of blue and silver: he slips; he recovers;

he is the monsters he describes; roaring, he blinds

each foe then mortifies or turns his enemies to stone; he finds,

in special cases, a new power, transmuting stone to dust

or whirling anticlockwise kills, with a spell, what moves too fast.

He lays out his charms and conquests in the porch,

a captive doll, a sheaf of horsetails, an old stopped watch,

then saying nothing presents to me his light sabre,

the blue tubing scuffed from the action, the handle’s silver

not so worn I can’t make out its outlined lightning bolt.

When I ask about the mess it’s made, he says it’s no one’s fault,

retracts the blue point so it looks like a relay baton

and, coming closer, he makes as if to pass it on.

Shield

His shield he made himself, out of an old Amazon box

having taken a kitchen knife to saw a heart shape out,

its edges rough, piped, serrated. He unrolled tin foil and tore,

papering the board with it and, from his mother’s sewing box, he took

two strips of red felt and fixed a cross to the shining foil.

Ready, after this ordeal of composition, craft and toil,

he made his way into the green yard and charged

but met, he could not believe his luck, the long broad axe

of the magnolia’s lower bough, where the shield still hangs,

because as he pulled it back it seemed to snag and lodge there more.

Retelling the story after he had been disturbed – someone calling

as he dealt out busy pain – he mentioned drawing his magic wand

and making the whole green scene a whited-out pond or sepulchre,

forgetting that yesterday he’d told us all that wand was no more,

destroyed as he took issue with a neighbour in the rain,

and that, as he spoke, it was easy to see over his shoulder,

the red and silver shield shining, in the sunset, from the tree.