Poetry
Three poems
Moonrise in a new suburb
Colorbondage:
fences edging the raw lowness.
On this street
Google maps can’t find yet
a full moon
has just been released.
Seems no one else saw it
jump the rooftops –
all the TV lights
through curtain cracks.
Over waste ground
winter green,
a moon
on parole.
The cat of Lisbon
The cat of Lisbon listens in its sleep –
the summer rustles outside
and a Marcha band
echo-locates the street.
When gulls cry from the Tagus,
the cat’s ears flick –
its ancestors went
with Cabral and Da Gama
down that estuary,
ratcatchers in Macau, Timor,
Goa and Brazil – riches
shining there like a sardine’s belly.
The cat of Lisbon is a white tabby,
a fine dark streak either side of its spine,
leopard spots like an old azulejo
from Mozambique.
A cat full of saudade,
it knows there’s an other self
on a balcony it can never reach,
even if it balanced on the washing lines
and leapt the centuries.
The fire enters Fairy Dell
White flakes fall, a breeze picks up,
the valley fogs with grey.
A forest kingfisher spotlit
by halogen-yellow sun
preys on moths escaping –
then flits as well.
The orange dancers come;
the quivertrees.
Black crescents spiral down that once
were green lance tips in the sky.
Two wattle birds still chase and squabble
though their territory’s alight.
The elemental is here.
It has a strange beauty –
heresy to call it so.
Up on Chatsworth Road,
neighbours with hose and rake
collectivise their firebreak.
A pendulum of water bomb
swings from a chopper’s underside –
a wrecking ball for flame.
Unseen, god-like, the pilot
leaves in a throbbing arc.
Up on the ridge
Fire trucks pulse carmine and blue
into dance-floor smoke
that came from crowds of eucalypts.
And now it’s fully dark.
The stumps are glowing in Fairy Dell
like lanterns on a Shinto path.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 16, 2022 as "Three poems".
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