A selection of poems by John Kelly
Telco Crash
While its virtues are ubiquitously
touted and near-idolized
as advantages in efficiency,
improved contact rapidity,
and enhanced global connectivity,
it takes but one malfunction,
not to mention piracy,
to wake us up to see
the cost is very high for
an increasing faith in
and dependency on
messianic promises and marvels
of uber-advancing technology!
Post-Dover Beach
Stranded on shingles, the Western beachhead
now quite in disarray,
as Matthew Arnold presciently intuited
on the night he rose up from his honeymoon bed
and looked out across the Channel:
a new tide of the rational and the irrational
surging in, displacing earth and rock
where faith for centuries had stood;
the tutored steerage of the mind wrenched madly
from its compass, the wild wheel spinning,
the mooring lines adrift; and, un-captained,
unattended, the fraught ship listing, course-less,
flayed on all sides by contending winds. . .
Once, not so very long ago, the port-bound sailor
adequately knew the distinct compass-points:
journeys had a purpose, like pilgrimages
suggesting possibility
beyond the immediate destination. . .
Step up to post-modernity, my friends,
where hegemonic dogma,
the latest a sophistic prevailing wind,
pronounces all is relative, nothing sure,
(except its own assertions)
and ‘mainstream’ culture’s love
sings more of eros than of agape.
Grandchildren at Play
She, at one, already bolder even than her elder brother,
and mobile, somewhere between a fast crawl
and a stuttering first-steps sprint
that end abruptly in belly flop or genuflection
before she reaches the intended coffee-table’s edge
and hauls her weight full-height to turn
the pages of the picture-books, especially the animal ones,
pointing and laughing at the coloured illustrations. . .
He, her big brother, is all of just-turned three:
his ready grin announces “I’m up for anything”
while his wide eyes shine with mischief in the offing –
he’s already into plucking and to throwing lemons
off the backyard tree, and hiding garden figurines
of gnomes, and birds, and turtles in the shrubbery. . .
And all the while the family dog called “Otto”,
a cross between a Belgian Shepherd and a Labrador
with a coat as black as moonless night, but happily,
the temperament of the latter,
vigilantly and with Job-like patience scouts,
like a trained sheep-dog, the children’s play;
and, when it suits, joins in, providing
his broad back for doggy-riding action.
The Acropolis of Athens
How, just how, in that war-torn,
plague-infested time and place
could human mind conjure up
a vision of such harmony and grace
whose ruins signal still for us,
in troubled times, what is achievable?
Her elegant remains protest today
against time pressing, passing.
Long now past the youthful glory
of her prime:
her patron goddess’s aegis,
her plundered and eroding frieze,
her crumbling columns,
despite sporadic make-overs,
all but vanquished. . .
though, even yet, the divine spark of logos
that first conceived her abides:
a time-transcending potency
wherever and whenever
God’s most Self-like of all creatures
lives, breathes, and dreams. . .
John Kelly is an Adelaide teacher whose third collection of poems A Schoolbag Full was released in 2021.