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ARTS AND CULTURE

Sonnet for a city

  • 03 June 2008

Sonnet for a city (After Trent Parke's Photographs of Sydney) The apparition of these faces in a crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. ------------------------Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro. Water colour petals grow into a crowd, now they’ve found legs to weigh upon, waiting, standing in thought, and gathering to bus themselves away from their lonely poise. They populate like confetti the dustproof draft of an afternoon under the offices of a singular Promethean glare, the loose change of cloud, and a sky adamant in light blue — Heaven's own gallery, where a saint shall guide anyone towards a meditation on the whole picture, if one can see it — that is, the cityscape you look upon, looking back at you, and asking 'Your name is again?' You'll say it's a tag to tell you're a complex figure of an individual graffittoed onto the Central Business District. Yet, you, in your graphic image, have no walls to be aware of, merely the cuts of quotidian eclipses filing their fill from working buildings. And the economy adheres each apparition along the damp, black boughs of common sense, while feeding every person a sharp, laconic wash of light — enough for a photograph or a few, to redeem them in their frailty, to hold their impermanence from their souls, framing all within an illusion, the great art, that human sort of eternity. Ben Hession Pentecost Tunnels of rent world and the cool white light of autumn overcast the restless day plaiting strands of air through gum then with an impatient hand letting go, so that almost undone they leave only the loose knit of leaf sigh and bird song beneath the crown. Sound flaps about like the tail of a kite, as wind picks up and shakes the fragile resolve of things that hold their own, like a knot of frightened men with flame lightening their brows, and the word braiding women in their midst. Anne Elvey Sonnet What of the understanding politicians are trite? And others who seek to blind the public's eye? As our journeys mature, black we are told is white We accept this reasoning and we don't know why. What of the frustrations with the gatekeepers of truth? Ether they become, whilst the keepers walk the talk. Is injustice a feeling spoken only in youth? That sincerity, when required should easily baulk? In the answer to the question what makes up the figure zero Public figures come forth with their self-endorsed advice, The scholar is rejected in favour of the spin-doctor's widow An answer is given: this answer will suffice. If cynicism is reality for the deflowered ideal Let scepticism