That spring was late. We watched the sky
and studied charts for shouldering isobars.
Birds were late to pair. Crows drank from the lamb's eye.
Over Finland small birds fell: song-thrushes
steering north, smudged signatures on light,
migrating warblers, nightingales.
Wing-beats failed over fjords, each lung a sip of gall.
Children were warned of their dangerous beauty.
Milk was spilt in Poland. Each quarrel
the blowback from some old story,
a mouthful of bitter air from the Ukraine
brought by the wind out of its box of sorrows.
This spring a lamb sips caesium on a Welsh hill.
A child, lifting her head to drink the rain,
takes into her blood the poisoned arrow.
Now we are all neighbourly, each little town
This is the second reference to a spring lamb, the  symbol  of innocence. This time it is sipping ‘caesium’ — a toxic radioactive chemical element — in Wales. The third ‘neighbour’, Wales, the poet’s country, has been identified. 
 The  juxtaposition  of positives — the young lamb on a lovely Welsh hill —  and a chemical poison reinforces, the idea of beauty devastated by man’s destructiveness.
Neighbours