Sodomite

The main idea, the general scheme is this

To decide, who is stronger and weaker.

We are the hollow men, Mr. Speaker,

We are the empty men, we won’t desist.

Empathy cannot be monetized. Facts

Are cash, like people: we move them offshore.

To divide stronger from weaker is more

A matter of what we do with spare tax.

Mr. Speaker, words like asylum

Get bandied about by do-gooders.

Our profits and an unseen prison

Are a dividend, a vote, a decision.

Our work is newsfeed, while those free loaders

Their days and nights, how do they use them?

Camera

 Will pictures bring it sooner the birdsong

Was not for him a question heard or unheard:

Best equipment got the moment referred.

The twentieth century went so long,

He had all morning to get the light

Glassy cliffs, frond angle, stream trick, side glows.

Sounds scintillate, but his frame was composed

To relive stories in the dark room’s night.

We peer childlike into gumleaf-brown lens

Upsidedown cascades of patterned still-life

Where there are no questions of right or wrong.

We hear what we wish to hear of birdsong

And faintly sense his calm, how his eye on life

Seizes the day that buried so many whens.

This week I have revisited photographs of my great uncle John Henry Harvey (1855-1938) held in the State Library, for posting on Lost Melbourne. Here is an undated photograph of forest at Eltham, with a Heysen feel to it. Also a sonnet about someone who would cart great cameras around the place in order to take a lasting image.

Team

So important being on theme

With others, all living the dream,

Moving forward and looking keen –

The main idea, or so it seems.

What if I’m on the wrong team,

The it’s-doing-my-head-in team,

The why-is-everyone-weird team,

The gaslit, base rung, fat chance team?

Perhaps I’m on the wrong tram…er, team.

It’s not as though I must come clean.

Am I even on a team, Doreen?

So important to have a scene

Where we will be and where we’ve been –

The main idea, the general scheme.

Away

Caesar has buried so many men,

Someone has the numbers but no one is counting.

Caesar has the stadiums hanging by his thumb,

The sound over the hills jubilant with blood.

Food in his houses needs ten chefs,

Plus decimating stooges testing poison.

He has a man at all times by his side

To remind him he’s human and that’s called Respect.

Caesar has no time for a province like this.

We can smell the seaside thyme,

Minute by minute watch hens argue over pieces of straw.

Here there’s wine when we get past philosophy.

In the cool we go to the library or the rockpools,

Make love or get our tongue around exile.

Breath

Our days and nights, how do we use them.

The birdsong in our skin is inevitable.

Handing out a bowl to catch the rain,

We look inside its shining rim and see a face.

Is that house in our head a sliderule only,

So fixed to our lineaments how can we see

That there is no way of doing without its

Lines of rooms, ending where we curl in sleep.

We use them staring, in fact, straight ahead

At an oblong of darkness, maybe a mountain

Or a face turning to meet us.

What other choice is there but to respect.

Defiance, revolution, all such are speed-process,

Will only bring it sooner – the birdsong unheard.

Genealogy

A footstep sound and thunder faraway

Were closing time Tuesday, at the library.

Genealogy leads to contraries

All but remembered prequel yesterdays.

Conversation sped as we travelled through lights,

Results of the rain on numerous streets.

For example, their voices, true and sweet,

Uptight about slights, insights about rights,

Speaking eighteenth century at their peak

Of love and weather and news and dinner,

Raving like lunatics, then strangely reserved.

Caught out in a storm they won’t be well-served

Arguing the time about some sinner.

Literally, this is what’s going on as we speak.