Poetry
But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods.
Hölderlin
Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have
set down in a hangar. The children stare at us.
Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know,
now we fly from land to land seeking comfort,
what it takes to cure lack once and for all.
Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist
to any blooming of the heart’s contentedness –
It's not cynical to be wary
Of what comes next.
It’s life’s lesson
Engorged by the media
That small treasures – a leaf, a love –
Are flamed by match or missile,
Destined to be memories.
If between one footfall and the next, the wind
can swivel and issue empty threats of rain,
for all we know this could be one of those days,
unpinpointable even in retrospect,
when a dimly held belief begins to melt,
say the belief that it’s somehow generous
to assume that everyone’s rather like you.
An open-ended day promising nothing,
but just as full of zipjams, language splashes
and thixotropic flows, lost somewhere between
the day you realised you wouldn’t always
have to pretend to be interested in X
(opera, hot cars, Buffy Summers, poetry)
Who exactly is available to tell us the story of our minds?
If I dream of an estuary called ‘Ephemeral Waters,’ an optimum of spectral love
anyone might allude to their misgivings. Or it’s interpersonal, the tide finds
its way round the three islands, flowing away from negative emotions, some remove
their shoes at the door, others talk of auras, or the portals of youth, the mark
Letters to the Tremulous Hand by Elizabeth Campbell & Man Wolf Man by L.K. Holt
Seen from that famous ray of light
Discharging from the town hall tower
On the last stroke of noon,
The hands would stand forever at that hour
As though the holocaust of blinding white
That set it all in train,
When present, past and future were triune,
Were come again,
The endless now on which the blessed take flight.
I won’t this time. Silent at last and shunted
Into its siding in the Victorian Arts Centre
The container train started its journey in Yugoslavia
Two years before it arrived in Gippsland
Among trees that echo Albert Namatjira.