Selected poems
Cloud sonnet
Morning, and it's enough to
watch the intention of clouds
make good their vocation
to cleanse a stained world.
Some days they disappear.
Absent from continuous blue,
they soon return, their
floating forms, mist-laden.
Like diaphanous angels
they chart our weighted lives
— the forward steps we venture,
foolish or very wise.
High-hearted, they understand
how much of us is water too.
History
I like history, reading about the past;
of the Egyptians for instance, with
those strange gods and hieroglyphs;
of the deep thinking Greeks who
gamely faced the Persians, made
sinuous vases, devised geometry;
and of course of the Romans who
invented the arch, built roads, sent
out legions and became an empire.
This morning, a girl sits opposite
me in the train, her arm a canvas
of ink, her eyes rimmed with kohl.
Her head bends to a phone. Ten
fingers fly. She has not noticed
that I am sliding into history.
Follow
It's a hard life
and the whipped sea's a terror.
Sometimes though, its slate beauty
lifts my heart.
It's hard work casting and hauling,
and net-mending's endlessly boring
except for the back and forth
with the boys.
And now, this stranger.
What is it? Something in his voice?
The way he stands against the sky?
Eyes that sum us up in a flash?
A word and the world is changing,
and fishing is not what we thought.
Follow, he says.
The Acts of the Apostles
It wasn't all action.
Sometimes they stopped in their tracks
struck dumb by the thought
that they had walked, talked, eaten and
drunk with the Lord of Creation.
How to explain that to their grandchildren,
let alone strangers!
The story could not to be contained.
It burst forth from their mouths
as they followed the Spirit.
Sometimes they stopped to pray
(though isn't prayer action?).
For some, their last act on earth,
meant death.
Bill Rush is a Melbourne writer and has published three books of poetry. His last book was Into the World's Light. He is a retired pharmacist with a theology degree.