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A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –
Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;
a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap
closes another deluded seeker of asylum
behind barbed wire; civil liberties
are spooked by terror; girl children
trafficked to sexual servitude –
and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,
the great-grandmother of my children
dead in another camp, another winter, another story,
can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –
although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart
is dry as yesterday’s crusts.
... (read more)By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint
somehow survives. This Sunday morning
a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,
and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.
... (read more)Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations
jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow
my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened
as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
... (read more)You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...
... (read more)