For Natalie

There is no poem in me
Crows on the evening, no platypus in the Darebin,
A catalogue of weeds versus herbs,
My right leg tweaks
There is no poem in me.

There is no answer in me
Cry the crows dryly:
Teenagers look down
Might is purple
Quiet hatred of bright things
Caterpillars
No answer in me.

There is no power in me
Not just black and blue birds confirm
That one.
Out in any weather I accept it
Righteousness or desire or wise planning
Not enough;
Reach and touch with invisible fingers of
Art all you like
No power no cry.

No Bastion in me
Crows beating gulls again:
A reef too far and in the middle of life
Turn to the abstracted common weal
Of my fracking occupation – am I
Still in that teenage place,
So many poems in me
There are none?

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2 Replies to “For Natalie”

  1. Hey Paul.
    That teenage place is certainlyy where i go to find my poems. Tney used to come so fast my pen could not keep up. Now they come very slowly still from the same place but boiled down to essentials.
    I have written these over the last few weeks. Still in progress.
    Merrry New elbows to you and yours
    Don

    GO DOWN TO THE BEACH GO DOWN
    Knife edges,
    everywhere
    a ridge of stone.
    Cutting, ribboned webs –
    fronds and fins and flesh (casterneted by sideways scuttle).
    Chopping great deaths
    to hunks and shards
    on our shattered beach.

    To much is taken
    out of times anguish.
    Slaughtered seals,
    dismembered dolphins
    splayed on the alter
    rocks in worship to some
    dreadful dollar dream.

    Echoing child play,
    the squeaking sand of a sundowned walk,
    wild horse rides,
    the frisking
    of a legion of dogs,
    a sudden rearing
    of waves
    at breast or feet
    in the glory of rampant surf:
    all run cold, red, down
    from the ridge of rock,
    the knife edge,
    at the throat
    of our commonality.

    What can only rise
    with slashed and anguished voices but anger
    and more death?
    Golfers laugh
    like drunken ravens
    while it stalks the edges
    of their tidy time traps.
    Mourning mists cloud
    friendships arcs.
    Anger brutalizes
    chance street meetings.

    Small men,

    Grotesque
    in their self important fancy, count the spoils of desecration.
    Money drools shallow fantasies- mansions far from here.
    There lives full of things
    that,
    like them
    and their sycophants and dupes,
    are bought and sold
    like cans of abalone.

    &

    THE DEAD SHEARWATER
    There is some triumph
    For the battered clot
    Of grey tumbled
    On the sand.
    The disaray of feathers
    Won for its kind
    A brief statistic
    Of species survival.
    The tumble of babies
    That daily, hourly,
    By the minute
    That do not die
    Store future death.
    Locusts strip the
    World of green.
    Worms eat out the
    Apple to a husk.
    What will You do
    Oh man to justify
    your bread
    And circuses
    To your
    Children’s Children’s
    Children?

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