Today won't be her eternity
Mirrors
In every corner of every room
Where God's urinating again:
Moody as Melbourne
She looks in
And sees what's left behind:
A diminished ninth (no-one will perform).
Doused in the downpour
Walls crumbling, she rushes
To correct the proofs
Of her existence.
She said she'll never write a book
And she hasn't: that's no book, it's a drop of experience
Infused with the spirit of Sabi.
Like it or not
Today won't be her eternity,
Alcoholically she
Soils God with sour tears.
The last time I saw her
Was in the obituary column:
Golden as always
Walking barefoot, cigarette in hand
Reflecting the sun's anonymity.
Inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975)
— Nick Trakakis
An encounter in New York
From inside steel and spans
Hard marble and thrusting elevators
We emerge out of grandeur
To come together in a world.
Scratching stone
Ruffling feathers
Beak preening and tufts of down
We share the blasts and flecks of rain
Closeness to the sky in an expected spray of wings.
But then comes our fall.
So wanting
To delightfully frame our wonder
Up go grasping walls of cell phones and cameras
To capture you, so, so near yet so far:
But you know not the wrought technology
Of our bars.
O sail, sail away on moving walls of wind!
Become a shooting speck in the sky
Leave us captives within our massive monument of ego
O messenger from God!
Bird on the balustrade,
86th floor Observation Deck, Empire State.
— Oscar Roos
N. N. Trakakis is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Australian Catholic University. His most recent poetry collection is Appearance and Reality. He is the editor of Southern Sun, Aegean Light: Poetry of Second-Generation Greek-Australians.
Oscar Roos is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University.