Before

Where it’s forever 1954 –

The house taking visitors talkative,

The thoughtful, jokey, the insensitive;
What wounds might they nurse, what today wore.

And beyond is colour yet more varied

Where town turns to bushland of endless spring,

Wild budgerigars winging everything

Where farms turn to rivers and bodies buried

Now the second thirty years’ war was over,

World divided by riches and isms

Technological advance and reverse,

The radio rehearsed, the newspapers terse,

The year before I was born to time’s prisms

Imagined in mind’s intense now or never.