Poems

Being from a young nation you find that dawn beguiles you

onto the exhausted saltmarsh,

miles of morose vacuity clad

in couch grass, cottonweed, random puddles, wire

and the odd, triumphant

                     flourish of pampas grass

featherily trying to tell dead factories,

                               Look here,

something fans, even at the far edge of Europe

where large gulls crowd and abruptly dip, although

the fish have all gone home to bed.

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.

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.

Made ghosts in all their country’s wars
they come, the young men in my dreams
with shattered skulls, intestines trailing
in the sand, the mud, the stuff the TV doesn’t
 show unless it’s Africa. Or someplace else where
colour doesn’t count, democracy a word
 they carted like a talisman, a passport
to the candles, bells of sainthood.