Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

ARTS AND CULTURE

Everything that ends

  • 23 June 2020
Selected poems

Everything that ends

In God’s eyes, nothing gets lost

- Elie Wiesel

Moment by moment the numbers are rising,

tables of the infected and the dead

on websites updated every five minutes,

the relentless clicking over of lives

like so many fallen leaves, in this country

and that one, and this number critically ill

and these recovered and these newly infected,

all nameless, all faceless, not touching me or you

yet, but coming, as governments and economists

count the cost, close borders, restrict travel,

impose quarantines and self isolation, 

a once fanciful dystopian plot become real.

Tell me your name Roberto, your secrets,

tell me Li of the streets of Wuhan, 

tell me of your loved ones, your plans, your passions,

show me photographs, talk to me

of the stories of your lives

millions of pages cannot render

so that everything that ends, continues. 

Facts

1.

The world is flat.

Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.

Bats can’t see.

She loved me.

2.

One person’s fact is another person’s fiction.

3.

Lovely as she was the distance was too great.

Facts were her bedrock, her trident,

the attire she dressed herself in.

No poet can bridge that chasm.

Fakes

(by Cobber ‘Stumpy’ Malley)

Ern was a good sort.

He would grab you by the imagination and swing you round

until you couldn’t tell which side was up.

The kind of guy you could rely on

if you could find him.

He wasn’t good at appearances.

It’s no surprise I’m a bit like that: it’s in the DNA.

If I could dream, I’d dream of being real:

that’s hard enough they say.

Cobber ‘Stumpy’ Malley claims an undefined genealogical connection to Ern Malley who was fictitiously born a century ago in 1918. He imagines himself as a man from the bush but in fact has rarely left suburbia, a fact that his constant wearing of an Akubra hat and boots cannot hide. Biographical details are sketchy but he may not be who he says he is.

Fictions

[a found poem]

Like a rivet through the hand

it is necessary to understand

that a poet may not exist. 

It is an ancient forgotten ruse.

It may be for nothing that we are:

but what we are continues.

There have been interpolations, 

false syndromes. 

In a dream of recognition,

momentarily, we awake

towards a purpose darker than a dawn.

No one warned

that the mind repeats.

There’s damned deceit

in these wounds. 

It is something to be at last speaking.

We are no longer young: 

I am content at last to be.

Note:

Every word in the above poem has been taken from the sixteen poems of Ern Malley, the fictitious Australian poet whose entire body of work was created in one day in 1943 by the Australian poets James MacAuley