In trans-Atlantic hindsight,
I began to understand you,
two years too late
to beg excuses, ignorance.
Even after tasting the stew,
the lies in my education,
clad in American
white dumpling conformity,
taught me not to trust the spices on my tongue.

My fairy tale knowledge
of romance poets and British rockers.
'Pale and faintly loitering'�
blinded me to twists of brilliance.

Distance and poetry reversed
the natural order, we loved
from the inside out,
soul glimpses to persona,
like reading first the last page
of a novel.

Mistaking the cultural for the personal,
wounded by your Etonian cruel cunning,
unaware it masked
the sensitive badger-poet
run to ground by the cynicism
of a fallen empire,
I scratched in your tunnel for my roots,
denied me by a London-born mother
pretending to be American.

Cast in the role
Of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'�
because you'd known no other,
I never rose above your fantasy.

A year in the making, undersea cables
and oversea mails fed the Circe.
Did I mention Americans
ignore ancient empires?

Once here, under Carolina smiling skies
the badger crinkled open his eyes,
rolled on his back and forgot inadequacy
in the ecstasy of a tummy rub;
wrote and laughed,
until the gut-wrench ache, born of
Anglo brittle words and battling wits
faded like the mist above your shrunken country.

But I clenched you like a talisman halved,
tight in my desperate fist.
I stole your history, borrowed it to
lay lovingly in my sacred trunk,
all the centuries of my culture
wrapped so neatly in your poems.

Engagements and your promises of immigration,
derailed once in Greenwich Mean Time,
were chewed by badgers with flashing yellow teeth,
then dissolved in yellow rainy light,
London despair.
Two years too late
I realize I drove the badger
to his comforting hole,
drove him to drag his belly groundward
until he bled the familiar.

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