No more the deathly sleet in famished mouths;
No more the bloom of cannon,
The shrapnel whimpered flesh,
The crack of bones.
No more the pink dither
On their Prince’s lips.
Tag: poem
The Cathedral at Reims
In the front of the great assertion that is Reims,
one Angel smiles.
He is Gabriel, delicately boned, familiar,
he has turned towards the Virgin
who stands in her long solemnity,
amongst the sober prophets,
and the proper saints.
Ensemble of strings
The Melbourne recital centre November 2012
Melodiously, in maple, spruce and ebony
The honeyed sap is rising:
A secret gravity of wise accumulations,
A throb of music gestating in the wood.
And so, gorged with notation,
In a glance they begin,
And their minds extend, abduct
And flex,
Arched exactly
To the curvature of the earth.
The Gate
In many parts of Africa people must pay bribes to be able to work, sometimes several bribes. There is always a gate-keeper.
Each day amongst the shanty lives
trading must begin anew
for earth-space, water, fire and work
[for now, at least, the brownish air is free]
Ibis
The Wetlands at Laverton
See the Wetlands where the Ibis roost-
Adjacent to the railway track-
Each rookery is a Lilliput
Where a single upright bird might stand
As tall as any Gulliver
In the quiet parishes of reeds.
When Ibis move
They do so in rosters of fastidious steps
Each bird as polite as a grandad
Who is looking for the salt.
Longing
It is the lightness of a hawk
That dresses the wind,
The tracings found
In crushed elegies of frost.
It is the shade that disappears
Into summer’s resinous hum,
The sigh contained in all rapt silences,
The shudder in the belly of a rose.
A morning at La Place des Vosges
In the garden of the great Square
the sun has been called to duty,
and the lime trees dress
to their cool attention,
their shade in meticulous ranks;
a fuss of pigeons in the leaves
whinges a gallic monotony.
A poem for Agnes Bojaxhiu
Recently published letters have revealed that although Mother Teresa of Calcutta spent many years in her inspiring ministry, she felt, during much of that time, a profound spiritual emptiness.
At each day’s end
You shawled the night about you
Gathering in the cold,
And rehearsed again
Your most private agonies,
As if your turn of phrase
Might stir a holy grammar, Might persuade the silence to speak.
But by day,
With the sureness of one who might attend upon a prince
You washed the disgrace from their bodies,
Eked out from them the blessing of their names,
And restored life
To those whose lives were ending.
A poem for Catherine Hamlin
Catherine Hamlin, an Australian Doctor, established a hospital in Ethiopia in 1974 with her late husband to treat women who had been damaged by the complications of childbirth. Because of their wretched injuries these women were commonly cut- off from their families and communities, often permanently.So far the hospital has successfully performed fistula repair surgery on more than 34,000 women.
She might have traced the sweetness of her child,
Raised him up,
Felt the weight of his infancy comply to her breast,
But the thorns of Africa drive deep:
In the groaning travail of birth she was cruelled,
In the joy of yielding to life she was abandoned
And curled in an atrophy of shame,
Was soured,
Became untouchable.
Sinead
Some years ago, Sinead and her friend Nikola were preparing to go out for the evening. A young man, unknown to either of them,
entered Nikola’s home and proceeded to stab both girls relentlessly. Sinead eventually fell to the floor with a knife wedged in her arm. Nikola fled upstairs, but the man followed and stabbed her in the heart. Sinead heard him leave and managed to drag herself upstairs to cradle her friend in her arms in the last moments of her life.
Still the days lunge at her
Wielding all the ferocity of that stricken day,
But, of Sinead, my mind goes
To the gravity of her hesitations
As she climbed that tortured stair,
And to how she knelt to her friend-
The strident fears still screaming in her brain-
And kneeling, cradled her friend to her death.
From within the terror,
In utter determination,
She raised from out of savagery.