(from Improvisations for Adam Baiting)
vi. Bread

in the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread means
a fair day’s work earns
a fair-floured loaf not
being told to calm down
dear because it’s only a
(testosterone) commercial
when the cabinet is full
of men born to rule
who would sweat dry
an entire country and dock
a single-mother’s right
to be free from the turd-
baking of errant husbands

The National Park

Imperious eyes of the trained killer
draped in a white flag, who would
maculate us with the venom of his clan.

Here where death is the stone inside
a rotting fruit; what would they ask
if not turning away at the final demand

which is speech. They enter the gable
of the national park and do not tell us
and are with themselves and are gone.

On the Cancellation of the Al-Sendian Festival
for Rasha Omran

Where a father laid out
                  too soon tips the bird
                                   from the olive branch

And the cedar wood
                  buckles under wind
                                    and laniaries of dust

Gut earth’s bloodlock
                  for toy silence in Tartous
                                    —the thresh of a sniper

On the mosque scaffold
                  blurred and wracked
                                    by a prong of stars

Cold coins to the general
                  low oud in the courtyard
                                    a widow’s cello moan                               

And the bricked road
                  and the red road banked
                                    by memorial flowers

And portraits of sons
                  missing at the funeral
                                    undead at the checkpoint                                 

At the rubbled amphitheatre
                  where a soldier looks back
                                    from the black canvas

Juniper-eyed at the unmade
                  window—a red eagle
                                   deadly to the throne

Bones and Blood

Where might the sitting council sit
on Martyrs Road? Will they bud
more lime-green shoots to spout
over the military garden? No calm
in the hedgerow along the dark mile
of the street, the bolt of a gunbarrel
juts from the grills like a baited snake.
The guards remain vigilantly poised,
wide-eyed in a weft of hammocks.
Why—for over thirty years—a 32°
chill still pervades the pagoda road?
And why—after years of mopping up
bones and blood—do the stray dogs
still cower, lapping at betel juice?

James Byrne’s most recent poetry collection Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc Publications in 2009. Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, published in June 2012, is co-edited with ko ko thett and is the first anthology of Burmese poetry ever to be published in the West (Arc 2012). Byrne is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally-renowned poetry magazine, which he co-founded in 2002. He won the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia and his Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published in Belgrade. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, published by Bloodaxe in 2009. Byrne lives in Liverpool and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. His poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, Burmese and Chinese and he is the International Editor for Arc Publications.

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