Lemonade with a Dead Sheep

Sunshine,
Birdsong
And children drunk on
Lemonade
And laughter.

That Welsh picnic
Has lasted forty years
And will last forty more
In dream

And in nightmare.

The stream babbled
Over pebbles,
Fern fronds
Brushed our sun-browned shins

Till the dead sheep
Slugged us in the guts.

Bloated and bulbous,
The body dammed the stream,
Its lifeless eyes
Crawling with life.

Those pearly marbles were
A child’s looking glass into death.

The pebbles we hurled
In reckless revulsion
Were the silent screams
Of violated youth,

And those dead sheep thuds
The dawning of our mortality.