This is snip from a suite for which I was awarded ‘Sydney Harbour Artist of the Year’.
A Gadigal Beach
Live with Fi Poole, ABC Coffs Coast.
Americans snap the Opera House from the ferry
and chat among themselves: ‘What’s the big deal?
Australia’s contributing sweet FA.’ I bite my tongue.
Yachts are now hauling long drawn-out bunting
of identical sails in the opposite direction. If nothing
is equal then what is fair on race day Wednesday.?
Amadeus noses around her anchor, a man appears
from below, leans over, works a rhythm, hand over hand
pulling her free of the harbour’s deep blue gravity.
Round the corner is Mossman’s Bay where Archibald
launched the city’s first whaling station. The flow
of blood inspired a healthy population of sharks.
Skittish scrub-wrens ignore pile drivers pounding
terra to construct the zoo’s new interactive –
Ozzie bush, backyard to farmyard with ‘wildness’.
The lawns of Kirribilli House are unused, gracile,
manicured with no signs of life, or of our leader,
or of the increased security I presume he has.
The sails are streaked. Men hang from the summit
attempting to wash away the bloody smear –
NO WAR capitalised on the Opera House.
Not one white spray of energy disturbs the surface.
Is this a tenuous moment of peace on earth? Alone
on Whiting Beach, Sydney Harbour’s most secluded.
March 19, 2003. An old poem, but as Ezra Pound said ‘Poetry is news that stays news’. ABC of Reading, 1934.
