Dawe, Bruce

Dinner at My Sister’s

1. Throughout those meals the slaughtering went on.
2. Like the blind French aristocracy who ate
3. With wolfish indifference at Trianon
4. While the mob howled bloody murder at the gate,
5. We’d sit there over our heaped platefuls. George,
6. My brother-in-law, reeking from the styes,
7. Forked down the hot food, grunted fierce replies
8. To a son who read land-sales from the Gazette
9. As though they were some spiritual exercise.
10. My sister sat, or served; the Tilly lamp
11. Flared like a torch in a vestibule of Hell.
12. On either side of the lamp, on looking up,
13. One saw the drear slow-motion agonies,
14. On viscous fly-papers, of captive flies.
15. The family scorned with ease their suffragette
16. Stick-at-it-iveness, the stir of legs and wings
17. Seemed emblem of all bondage only to me
18. – Two species in conflict, tottering
19. Each through its own Totentanz, tediously
20. Kicking against the fatal honeyed measure.
21. So, too, George wolfed away, until such time
22. As he himself confronted on his plate
23. A struggling wretch whose throes apostrophized
24. Such appetites, whose individual buzz
25. Sickened with its persistence, more than when
26. It pleaded with its brothers common cause
27. As they twirled in murmuring ribbons overhead.