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This poem is taken from PN Review 167, Volume 32 Number 3, January - February 2006.

Five Poems Peter McDonald


Spoils

Our taxi sails on an open road
where they have paved the wilderness -
unending hilly scrub-land

that later I look out across,
as night falls, from the balcony
of a house in a new town,

spotting arc-lights between the sky
and the next hill, watched in my turn,
while masts of concrete and steel

frame building-sites against the moon,
darken themselves, and then grow tall,
taking their certain bearings from

a fenced road to Jerusalem:
late, and better late than soon.


Syrian
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