Trespassing

across winter fields

we found barbed wire, a willow screen,

smoke rising and alarm.

Came the word 'inhabited'

and from some Roman self 'by savages.'

A thick church silence here as though

this land were in communion with its dead.

Then twigs snapped like bones

across a knee: he rose from smoke

and generations, soily-dark and slow.

Hips implied a holster:

eyebrows came on like lowered horns,

we shrank to landscape figures

then he called. About our heads

seagulls, in panic, rose and stormed.