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It rose in its tall verticals from the grace and welcome of the earth, / That swooned far, far below, / As canny masons hefted the limestone / Into vast beatitudes of grace; / Shipwrights inverted their minds to groom the oak, / So that it would soar, / As if a celtic monk had charmed a serpent into a holy phrase.
While we can only speculate on what it means for the future of funding beyond the current budget, alarm bells are ringing for many of us who recognise the symbolic power of rendering the arts invisible at a federal level. A strong, vibrant arts sector is essential to a thriving democracy.
You don't know the word for butter, so you spend seconds miming the way it froths in the pan. The owner of the shop says nothing. You want to buy their famous pesto, but it's nowhere on display. You speak to other customers, who nod and frown. Eventually you point at fragrant cheese and a melon that smells of ripest green.
After spirit-lamps were doused the house drew in upon itself; its clutch of dreamers moaned and tossed in stifling mosquito nets — each isolating sac of mesh a Magellanic cloud.
Obituarists sharpened their quills in 2014 when word had it the death of Clive James was imminent. Since then we have witnessed a late flowering of poetry, reviews and articles tinged with mortality that revealed to the last his Twainian flair for journalistic self-promotion, albeit in the internet age. Now the quills are out in earnest.
I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk
Hopkins' words highlight how difficult it is for poets or lesser human beings to focus consistently on the particularity of each human being, let alone of each being in the world. Yet this is a necessary condition for recognising the claim that each person and the world make on us. It is no wonder that we sometimes falter in our commitment.
From strip searches to a needlessly low minumum age of criminal responsibility, Australia continues to be a menacing place for children encountering law enforcement. The need to be seen as 'tough on crime' plagues the major parties and precludes nuances within the criminal justice sphere including the protection of the rights of the child.
Staring toward the stringy picture through a linguistic lens I have begun to see that the elderly magic, deplored by most religions, was a daughter of coincidence mathematically robed in some downright glorious colours.
Due to this stance, immigration is arguably not being leveraged to actually benefit the country, including its flailing economy. This is despite a government report released last year stating that immigrants increase GDP and helped avoid the 2008 financial crisis.
It's difficult to move in this landscape. Haunted and fragile and tragic, there's no place that is benign. A cursed house, the Greeks might say.
Thank God for Bollywood and daytime TV. For the all night partyers and marathon love makers. For the hash brownie bakers, the nut crackers and pot-stirrers ... the drum-beating banjo-twanging wannabe musicians ... the incense wafting up from the first floor through our bathroom vent — frankincense I'm tempted to think.