A walk in the park
Sunday afternoon, summer, sunny, almostclammy, the little hand stretched up forcompanionship, security across the generations.The Shrine seemed to get in the way as we walkedup the hill to the Botanical Gardens, all lushgreen and refreshed after the heavy mid-week rain.And so it was, happy families, ice creams, Potterchildren's playground, wriggling childrencongregating in their uncoordinated steps up theflowing stream, like insects at a creek. Eventuallyit came, on the way home, gently. He and I werethanked for taking off our hats as we enteredat the top of the steep steps of the Shrine,the solemn darkness of the main columned space,the light streaming in past bas reliefs of war, braveryand valour from an earlier age. Outside it was the simplequestions about war and death and injury. Somehowthe answers did not fit the logic of the four-year-old.Down at the bronze 'Cobbers' sculpture, deathand life became clearer and muddier. This weekunable to sleep he walked in on the news andthe war in Afghanistan, but was swiftly usheredaway; too much reality in one week.
Tony London
Those who stayed behind: an ANZAC poem
We are those who remain, once callow now bent in wearinessLife's breath no longer robustThe single purpose once so clear, now confusedOur futures so simple but overthrown
Cowering in sacred fields, ducking the booming retorts from those murderousmachines we cradled our weeping brothersWe miss not the cloying sludge, the stench, the bleak resignationYour ultimate gift is not lost in a fluttering of years
O for a day without comrades bloody fallenLovers in guttural grief, shrieking, sobbingAnd mothers in stoic dignity, mantillas drawn tightOur heroic flame, corralled colts brazenly waiting, cruelly snuffed
Have we learned nothing my friend?Lives torn, bodies twisted and broken, need we askRuing life's slips and trips and misused chancesLamenting faltering love and starry optimism unfulfilled
John Templeman
Poets on strike against another war in the Middle East, 2012
Strike! What else can you do to stop war as a poetAnd the prologue to carnage gets going? so bleak coming onThe familiar old tension builds up and the wild surge below it
Turns leaders to strutting and pomp they're ripe to bestow itThe US is bristling with weapons which want for a songAnd a strike is about all