Poetry by Les Murray

Some Recent Poems

The following poems are taken from Les Murray's latest collection, Poems the Size of Photographs (see Biobliogaphy).

The showcased poem The Meaning of Existence is also drawn from this collection.

The Aboriginal Cricketer
Mid-19th 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.
Keep fending off their casts.

Don't come out of character.
Like you they suspect
idiosyncrasy of witchcraft.
Above all, don't get out

too easily, and have to leave here
where all missiles are just leather
and come from one direction.
Keep it noble. Keep it light.

On the Borders

We're driving across tableland
somewhere in the world;
it is almost bare of trees.

Upland near void of features
always moves me, but not to thought;
it lets me rest from thinking.

I feel no need to interpret it
as if it were art. Too much
of poetry is criticism now.

That hawk, clinging to
the eaves of the wind, beating
its third wing, its tail

isn't mine to sell. And here is
more like the space that needs
to exist aound an image.

This cloud-roof country reminds me
of the character of people
who first encountered roses in soap.

Predawn in Health

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 all horizons is the past.
 
The soul sits looking at its offer.

The Images Alone

Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword,
white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
as at a whoop of young men running loose
in brick passages, there occurred the thought
like instant stitches all through crumpled silk:
 
as if he'd had to leap to catch the bullet.
 
A stench like hands out of the ground.
The willows had like beads in their hair, and
Peenemünde, grunted the dentist's drill, Peenemünde!
Fowls went on typing on every corn key, green
kept crowding the pinks of the peach trees into the sky
but used speech balloons were tacky in the river
and waterbirds had liftoff as at a repeal of gravity.

The New Hieroglyphics

In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.

Thumbs down to ear and tongue:
World can be written and read, even painted
but not spoken.  People use their own words.
 
Latin letters are in it for names, for e.g.
OK and H2S O4, for musical notes,
but mostly its diagrams: skirt-figure, trousered figure
 
have escaped their toilet doors.  I (that is, saya,
Ego, watashji wa) am two eyes without pupils;
those arent seen when you look out through them.
 
You has both pupils, we has one, and one blank.
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.
 
The effort is always to make the symbols obvious:
the bolt of electricity, winged stethoscope of course
for flying doctor.  Prams under fire?  Soviet film industry.
 
Pictographs also shouldnt be too culture-bound:
A heart circled and crossed out surely isnt.
For red, betel spit lost out to ace of diamonds.
 
Black is the ace of spades.  The kind of spades
reads Union boss, the two is feeble effort.
If is the shorthand Libra sing , the scales.
 
Spare literal pictures render most nouns and verbs
and computers can draw them faster than Pharaohs scribes.
A bordello prospectus is as explicit as the action,
 
but everywhere theres sunflower talk, i.e.
metaphor, as weve seen.  A figure riding a skyhook
bearing food in one hand is the pictograph for grace,
 
two animals in a book read Nature, two books
Inside an animal, instinct.  Rice in bowl with chopsticks
denotes food.  Figure 1 lying prone equals other.
 
Most emotions are mini-faces, and the speech
balloon is ubiquitous.  A bull inside one is dialect
for placards inside one.  Sun and moon together
 
inside one is poetry.  Sun and moon over palette,
over shoes etc are all art forms but above
a cracked heart and champagne glass?  Riddle that
 
and youre starting to think in World, whose grammar
is Chinese-terse and fluid.  Who needs the square-
equals-diamond book, the dictionary, to know figures
 
led by strings to their genitals mean fashion?
just as a skirt beneath a circle meanas demure
or ao similar circle shouldering two arrows is macho.
 
All peoples are at times cat in water with this language
but it does promote international bird on shoulder.
This foretaste now lays its knife and fork parallel.