Occupation

armoured cars can't defeat our children's pidgins;
they create creoles, in retreat from the past;
heaping up language to block the streets; tangled
hedgerows of words, bent-edged symbols, shapes flexed
from the field's biscuit mix; unwrapping brittle letters,
each a cool blue tablet placed on the sky's tongue;
from their growing points, characters flare
like catapult arms thrown into the air, watch them:

in occupied territory, despite our best efforts
to tread them down, force
our heathen history into their barbaric skulls,
they construct new limbs from punctuation; 
and correct the damaged grammar of their bodies
with fluid hands