Invasive species

Come the summer we’d gather sticks and chains

to thrash the knotweed, exported from Japan

to the field and copse behind our house,

all that remained of an ancient Domesday woodland.

Its hollow stems reminded me of torture stories

from the Second World War, of how a man

would be immobilised above sharpened bamboo shoots.

The plants would burst in and through the body.

Using canes for bows my hand would often slip along a split.

How the bamboo cut, how the cuts would sting.

Inside each cane some white pulp

like the stuff inside the pods of runner beans.

And, I imagined from my comics, inside the heads

of people too, bursting when the bombers came.