Selected poems
Drum beats
'feel the beating
of the hearts gathered
in the hollow of the drum.'
— 'Message Sticks': Josephine Bacon
[Innu-aimun]
In the quiet darkness
between the rain
scudding through,
they say destructive winds,
how does that look in
the dark, the threshing
and the flailing,
submission to the elements?
Winter fronts roll through,
we have had our tongues out
for rain, genuflected
in case it may have helped,
and now another scud
rattling on the tin roof,
gutters run over like a
gushing bereavement.
There is foment out there
in 24/7 land, alienation, no
sense of understanding,
a disconnect, not like us
who traipse through newly
wet paddocks, slushing, mudding,
or kick up dust and stones
in summer stillness, we can
feel the pulse, the earth is a
drum across which we walk
respectfully, know how to make
it reverberate, read it with
our bare feet, in our heartbeats.
We have been taught the rhythms,
know how to call the next valley,
and out here in Country, can call
up boiling clouds to give succor,
to wet and tighten the skin of the
drum, so we can sing and dance again.
Space oddity
'Busy old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus'
— Donne: 'The Sunne Rising'
Through the wide glass eyes
of the silent space swimming station,
its orbit defined by swooping
loops of loose gravity,
omniscient above the winking earth,
blue earth, swollen image, Christmas
bauble of temptation and beauty,
suns and moons calling the divisions
of day and night, in accelerated
snatches of reality, pictures of sleep,
memories of sleep, sleeplessness,
beams of light so strong, eclipses
and clouds all creating a life
without context and reference
points, where gravity gives,
and takes away any grasp of
firmament, toe hooks on
the base plate to give a sense
of stability, grip of reality, where
standing fast for a few moments,
reminds us what it is to get a hold,
to be erect and standing fast,
gives a sense of humanity.
David may have sung his way
through an imaginary, rotating,
hovering world of invisible tension,
Chris Hadfield lived out the dream,
floating guitar in hand, became one
of the stars for orbiting, the haunting
melody rotating with the suns and
moons, that divide time, reality,
and the words of the song echo
in extremis as they begin
their journey
to the end of somewhere,
nowhere,
in the theoretical lenscape
of infinity, with beeps, light rays,
light years, with no reference points
except those you thought you knew
before you let go and trusted the
boosters and the technicians at
ground control, who may by now
be trapped in the cobwebs of history,
be dead in the other time from which
you were released at take-off.
When the man comes
'The old cormorant keeper —
I haven't seen him
this year'
— Buson
Seasons and events roll out
in a long pattern, like the way
the wet comes across Country,
trickling down waterways, a
presence unannounced,