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ARTS AND CULTURE

An echo of silence

  • 30 March 2020
Selected poems & now

 

& now

the Earth

 

has pulled

back, enough

 

is

rolled up

 

its sleeves

backed itself

 

against itself

to hold off

 

what it is

we most fear

 

ourselves

 

 

    here

 

Here is this

an echo of silence

 

as we lay the years

to rest & memory

 

is some rash intrusion

but, it is not

 

it is bold

as arms around a world

 

would show our being

& then some

 

a child in swaddling

cloths, a swaying palm

 

a bigger story

this fire 

 

 

  summer of cousins

 

Melbourne in summer

& the weather is grand & blazing

proof that global warming is real

 

At my age I allow myself

to be surprised

 

At the NGV

they have commodified art

Haring & Basquiat

a wall paper of sky

& a minimalist pop up shop

all the contradictions of commerce

 

Through Coburg in the long ago

I hitched towards Sydney

falafels now good enough

to cause an Arab Spring

 

Along bitumen skinny legs

made to measure jeans

no fittings in the last fifteen minutes

before closing

& this in a city of sewing machines

 

At Readings I get Molly

Yellow Notebook Diaries Volume One

she lives around the corner

 

& a toast of drinks at the Clyde

for David

where we had his wake

dead now, maybe eight years

 

A morning show of bicycles

& runners who stop for Coronas

from an esky in the shade of Rushall Station

 

Along Drummond

the park softens

the Housing Commission flats

 

A double espresso at Tiamo’s

with two lots of Saturday papers

from the seven eleven

I pass Helen Garner

& tell her how good Yellow Notebook is

& how she saved my life

one Writers’ Week luncheon in ’78

when she was the first to sit down

the shade of some overheated winery

 

I was too wasted to stand

when Judith Rodriguez

backed the gong for Water Life

for the Festival Awards

 

A long dog’s walk through the university

the gracious landscape of lattice Parkville

renovations on the high street

& fish head laksa in North Melbourne

 

Wide boulevards

antiques & a surviving book shop

the city edge of Royal Park

where the dogs run free

& we sleep a little in this sun of fine weather

 

Sacred Heart Church

is closed for Sunday Mass

the alternative is jump for Jesus at St Jude’s

Anglicanism on 26 January

in my cooked one lovely

kangaroo tail t-shirt

from a mob of print makers in the Alice

 

I can talk about cousins forever

Rory Harris currently tutors at Playford College, a small R-9 school in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. His most recent collection, beach (2016)
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