Geoff Page
Flags
January 26
The honours list has been announced,
recipients are ‘humbled’.
Three jet fighters, adolescent,
fly past proving nothing.
Fireworks later on are promised.
None of this requires
my serious attention.
How many million barbecues?
Our tall ships and our
sixty thousand years
attempt a sort of ba ...
Judgement
If all we’re told is right
how wearisome He’ll find it;
all those fine gradations,
those mitigating factors.
Psychopaths are easy
but who are we to say?
The virtuous are harder,
their sin of subtle pride,
their svelte self-satisfaction.
The normal are the worst,
one day a fine donation,
next day a little nip ...
The Notebooks
Thirty years of dreams are stored
in notebooks, written down on waking.
Her daughter’s kept them all,
imagining her mother moves
among those shimmering and scribbled
layers on a bedside table.
Those narratives live on, she’s sure,
in all their raw hallucinations,
their sudden runs of ecstasy,
their weird humili ...
Geoff Page has published twenty-two collections of poetry, as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include ...
... (read more)A small town in the 1940s. We're paused here, slightly sweating, on a route march from the future. The houses are all wearing down, decrepit from a failed decade, and yet their window glass is polished. I recognise each house in detail, can almost name the families, but know too what the years have wrought. This one, that one. Weatherboard or brick or fibro, torn do ...
Seeing people who remind you
just a little of the dead
is always mildly disconcerting –
something in the face, the gait,
the shoulders from behind,
those likenesses that don’t surprise
The Best Australian Poems 2014 edited by Geoff Page
