Australian Poetry

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

            asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

            or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

            its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

            before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

            yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

                        may now be well at last.

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a splay of emerald, turquoise, black and yellow feathers – was too dazed to bite, and clearly had a broken wing. Though we’ve always called these beautiful birds 28s, technically they are a ring-necked parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln variety of ring-necked. The demarcation lines between varieties are hazy. The local ‘nickname’ matters as local names do. We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. My daughter doesn’t know it died. She said it was the closest she’d ever come to something so ‘amazing’. I left it at that.

for Craig Sherborne

‘Grief wrongs us so.’

                                                  Douglas Dunn

To the sea we bear our fathers in state –

or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.

Surf mild as receding tides,

we slump in dunes with our burdens,

The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher

who begets the rainbow bee-eater

who begets the firetailed finch

who begets the forty-spotted pardalote

who begets the damsel fly

who begets the jewelled beetle

who begets a pentangle of reflected light

that falls on a colony of dust mites

(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)

Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.

Nobody answers him.

She’s got dark hair that stops

just above her shoulders.  Turns up at the ends.

She’s very slim, Max says.

He’s talking to Hamid

about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,

whom he is hoping to meet

somewhere south of Baghdad.