Les Murray

Humans are flown, or fall; Humans can’t fly. We’re down with the gravity-stemmers, Rare, thick-boned, often basso. Most animals above the tides are airborne. Typically tuned keen, they Throw the ground away with wire

Mid-9th century Good-looking young man In your Crimean shirt With your willow shield Up, as if to face spears, You’re inside their men’s Law, One church they do obey; They’ll remember you were here.

I starred that night, I shone: I was footwork and firework in one, A rocket that wriggled up and shot Darkness with a parasol of brilliants And a peewee descant on a flung bit;

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing With fleas, in rock-cleft or building Radar bats are darkness in miniature, Their whole face one tufty crinkled ear With weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing. Few are

Sprawl is the quality Of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce Into a farm utility truck, and sprawl Is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts To buy the vehicle back

In my aunt’s house, the milk jug’s beaded crochet cover Tickles the ear. We’ve eaten boiled things with butter. Pie spiced like islands, dissolving in cream, is now Dissolving in us. We’ve reached the

Everything except language Knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time Know nothing else. They express it Moment by moment as the universe. Even this fool of a body Lives it in part,

We who travel between worlds Lose our muscle and bone. I was wheeling a barrow of earth When agony bayoneted me. I could not sit, or lie down, Or stand, in Casualty. Stomach-calming clay

Blats booted to blatant Dubbing the avenue dire With rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard Leading a black squall of Harleys With Moe Snow-Whitebeard and Possum Brushbeard and their ladies And, sphincter-lipped, gunning, Massed in leather

From the metal poppy This good blast of trance Arriving as shock, private cloudburst blazing down, Worst in a boarding-house greased tub, or a barrack with competitions, Best in a stall, this enveloping passion

The stars are filtering through a tree Outside in the moon’s silent era. Reality is moving layer over layer Like crystal spheres now called laws. The future is right behind your head; Just over

In the painting, I’m seated in a shield, Coming home in it up a shadowy river. It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell And my hands grip the gunwale rims. I’m A

It was built of things that must not mix: Paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil. You heard the water dreaming in its large Kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood

Once played to attentive faces Music has broken its frame Its bodice of always-weak laces The entirely promiscuous art Pours out in public spaces Accompanying everything, the selections Of sex and war, the rejections.

Religions are poems. They concert Our daylight and dreaming mind, our Emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture Into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words And nothing’s true

That slim creek out of the sky The dried-blood western gum tree Is all stir in its high reaches: Its strung haze-blue foliage is dancing Points down in breezy mobs, swapping Pace and place