They gathered in taverns, in wind-swept grassy fields, and
in caves they dug under the roots of their fathers' trees.
Heresy is limited only by the rims of men's hats and the
duration of home-made candles. Underground, they wore
feathers and spoke words forbidden, and they giggled as if
they were four-year-olds, toes in winter streams, noses
kissing brown wheat, the thousand legs of caterpillars,
kettle-steam rising to the ceiling timber, the littlest
brother too sick to go to school. It was all illegal,
home-made and so little oxygen, deep down under the grass,
bread and beer and tobacco, while above-ground, in pleasant
valleys, they studied law in slaughter-houses.

Surrounded by saw-dust, mother wove together the disparate
threads, and on midsummer's eve they started the Uprising,
brandishing cotton hats, scarves fresh from the loom,
feather-dusters in hand towards the abandoned well. The
captain was tied up and puffy, sweat under stars, and they
wrapped him in linens and gave him his pipe, and cut off his
head as the sweet smoke came up through their noses...

All this is written in a book. It is buried by a river-bank,
under a cloud-burst, bare-foot, hog-washed, strewn with
roses, wearing feathers, laughing, singing...