Paradise Retained (2)

Michael Peach

If you wish not to fall,
Balance is all.

Jerusalem
9 October 1995

The milk and cream of human kindness ease The bullish

Despite the ATVs and motorbikes That shake my fragile balance

Like all the kindest men’s in history, Will’s anima was

In his sonnets Will’s narrator loves a manPlatonically; for he’s

How ironic and poetically just That the blatant ethnic-cleansing And

Could anything ever persuade The fatalistic fundamentalists, Who literalize and