Selected poems
Cruise
1.
It’s been a blowsy sort of sunset.
Glass in hand, we’re nine floors up
passing underneath the bridge
so close we almost touch it.
Higher up again, two flags:
one of them the Southern Cross
with Union Jack; the other done
in red and gold and black.
Off there to the starboard side
the skyward thrust of Star Casino.
Barangaroo is strangely honoured
and now, just past the bridge,
Jørn Utzon’s row of splendid shells.
A DJ’s playing soul and funk.
Next, to port, we pass North Head,
that place of isolation,
unspoiled silence still
where campfire smoke would once have greeted
Arthur Phillip with his claim.
We’re on our second drink by now
and some among us pause,
imagining a Gadigal
imagining that we’re
the first ship of some Final Fleet
returning whence it came.
2.
Reaching out like genteel fingers,
cruise ships make the names come back:
James Cook, Abel Tasman,
Dirk Hartog and the rest,
each one in his century
wrestling with longitude,
not knowing what was coming next,
naming islands after patrons
in Whitehall or their country piles.
Today we sail by satellite
seas that little fraction wider,
albeit with the shoals well-known
and hurricanes predicted,
fresh comestibles each meal,
fine cutlery and well-pressed linen.
All day we latter-day Magellans
are dozing by the pool,
nine storeys high above
old whispers underneath.
3.
Sailing into Milford Sound,
three hundred metres vertical
and ninety metres down,
even the man with microphone
is for a moment hushed.
4.
And here in the companionways
oil paintings from the 1930s,
sleek art deco liners powering
blithely into what’s to come.
There’s been a war and that’s ensured
new turbines turn with greater ease.
Each empire brings the art it wants.
Their prows divide the Seven Seas.
Strange Gods
1.
To what strange gods do they give praise
lying here in filtered light
languidly on ranked chaises tongues
and wondrously content with life?
Can it be a Roman one,
possibly with Bacchic bulge,
who promises his followers
he will infallibly indulge
all those who laze beside his pool
aiming for some small renown
with devotees who like to check
which of them’s the deeper brown?
2.
I know about the honorific
so treasured by the Javanese
who speak as if to reigning princes
evading all that might displease.
They seem to know though we Australians
rarely call a cook a chef —
and so by cheery compromise
I am addressed as “Mr Geoff”.
3.
“Half an hour will be enough, “
our friends had said of Timaru
and seemed to hit the mark although
we scarcely gave the place its due.
More though can be said of Picton,
its overture … Queen Charlotte Sound,
its waters green as Switzerland
and proper coffee to be found.
4.
Eventually, it starts to happen,
the on-board metamorphosis,
the extra fried eggs “sunny-side”,
the hash browns just for emphasis.
The second pastry after after lunch
was never a deliberate plan
but two weeks more and I shall be
a sadder and a wiser man.
Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published 22 collections of poetry, two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include Gods and Uncles and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography.
Main image: Life belt on wall (Depositphotos).