Rachael Mead #5, The nail

The nail

The iron smells of rain, tastes of blood.

Beaten by more than time, its head is bowed

wearing hammer marks as warrior’s scars

but deep in its heart this nail is a homemaker.

Unseen for most of its life, this nail in my palm

held joist to rafter, the pate of its bullet-head

a tiny eye holding up the sky of our bedroom.

Confident, stubborn; it has a worthy pedigree.

Its kind endured slavery for millennia,

our dominion over the earth impossible without 

their ancestral toil to split and hold the flesh of trees

while hot cross buns forget their ferrous root.

A nail is a splinter of the core, the seed of the knife,

a theory that through violence bonds can be forged.

It divides us from our animal selves and in its honour

it is the part of our bodies that holds the moon.