The arc of history

They launched a thousand ships

across the Dardanelles to Troy

to abduct a single woman. 

They launched a single hull

from Flinders Island 

across the Bass Strait

to contain all the women left

after settlers and disease 

had had their way.

The temple of Athena was desecrated.

The Big River rock art was vandalised.

It turned out gifts had strings attached.

The war lasted ten years.

The war lasted three thousand years.

The war was never ending. 

It was the end of an age 

and when the survivors spoke

people didn't listen, they drank 

and sang songs of rape

as though it was victory.

(During the "Black War" the indigenous people of Tasmania were reduced in number from about 15,000 to 154 who were resettled on Flinders Island. The war had been precipitated ten years earlier in part because of settlers' abduction of indigenous women. 47 people survived Flinders Island, including 11 women, and were resettled again to Oyster Cove near Hobart.)

Chains

"Let us throw off our chains," she said. 

"Yes, let's," they agreed. She thought 

it was because they wanted to be liberated, 

like her. It turned out they just wanted 

to wear her chains instead of their own,

and so, instead of finally becoming free, 

she became more profoundly enslaved 

than when she had to wear them herself.

There is no end

What terrifies us is not death.

It is our sense of incompleteness.

We fear the space and emptiness 

that pads out where we are absent,

is all that will be left of us,

but there is no annihilation to fear,

only an end to one way of being.  

The void is not lifeless. 

We take life with us as we enter.

We have individual perspectives: 

we see different constellations 

in the same collection of stars; 

we think we lose what makes us unique

as time passes and our line of sight shifts,

and we move into the empty space before us,

and the pattern we see and identify with

changes until it no longer exists, 

but that pattern was never us. 

The stars survive our point of view.

We do not end with everything 

we knew, or thought we knew.

Our incompleteness is not us,

any more than the mistakes we made

before learning error is all we inherit

from our former selves

with each new increment of understanding,

and a greater knowledge lies beyond

the end of this way of knowing,

among all the unseen starlight

that ever fell on a barren world.

The fragment

The fragment read: "What if 

no-one agrees with each other? 

What if we only think we do, 

but were we truly to understand 

each other's reasons and motivations 

we would be utterly horrified? 

"What if we are all monsters, 

cannibals on our best behaviour, 

and civilisation is cross-purpose,

"a teetering, unstable scaffold 

of mutually supportive mistakes,

upon which we climb to announce

opinions to no-one, everyone nodding 

without knowing or understanding

what they are agreeing to,

the impression of agreement

just one big happy coincidence?

"Forget those who disagree with you. 

You know where they stand better 

than those with whom you agree. 

Danger is behind you, not facing you. 

Hate seeks cover in virtuous accord. 

What envenomed fragrance we breathe 

in the perfumed arguments of our allies? 

Chaos finds camouflage in reason.

"Logic is an artefact of saying things 

one at a time rather than all at once. 

It places them in order so the world

will fit the sleeve of speech, 

"but were we to see behind its façade,

and see all at once everything it conceals, 

we'd see it hides the stampede 

of who we truly are, 

a beast of ecstasies and atrocities 

that feigns domestication

for a loaf of daily bread 

from the temple granary."

It took generations of scholarship

to reassemble the broken tablets,

decipher the cuneiform, and only then

discover we had retrieved a partial text,

one side of a conversation in a lost epic,

a dispute between kings and gods

in the ruined city's foundation myth. 

The god's reply is a matter 

of academic speculation.

"Now is not the time"

 The midwife to my mother said
"push hard just one more time".
What popped out but Brown's grey head
saying "now is not the time".

"Stop the thief," I cried aloud
trying to prevent a crime,
but Brown quickly quelled the crowd
saying "now is not the time".

I fell to my knees and proposed, 
dreaming of church bell chimes,
Brown whispered in my lover's ear
that "now is not the time".

Heaney said "this side of the grave"
sometimes "hope and history rhyme,"
but on my tombstone Brown has carved
that "now is not the time".

The tryst

Where is the person we betrayed

when we first made ourselves fit

the expectations of others?

We made a promise to meet them one night,

to run away together and live in the woods

and never talk to another living soul,

treating humans with the same suspicion

as something hunted, experiencing

the continuous ecstasy of the wild, 

walking with death and life alike 

along our path as long as it lasted, 

getting ourselves lost never to be found, 

but I never turned up. I stayed in bed,

woke up, had breakfast, went to school, 

passed exams, went to college, graduated, 

got a job, a career, raised a family, 

and forgot about that midnight rendezvous. 

Are they still there, waiting?

Do they keep the faith I broke

whole, unremarkable even, tucked away

in a rucksack between sandwiches and thermos?

Will they still be there waiting

on the day I don't wake up? 

Victory

Enjoy victory while it lasts, 
so the memory gives you strength 
when next you need it. 

The inner scream is reduced 

to a whisper for a while. Remember 

when tumult next surrounds you.

Perhaps all we ever win is memory,
a reason to keep fighting
the next time that we lose.

Celebrate. Drink all the drinks.

Dance and kiss your comrades, 

for there are no victories,

only varying degrees of defeat, shuffled, 

dealt, gathered in, and shuffled once again,

what we call victory relative and temporary,

so love, laugh, and keep living,
until you can no longer
outlive your enemies.

Hypatia's smile

The Cheka churn their captives in nail pierced barrels

in a basement in the Lubyanka, making confessions

that stink like cheese. 

and have done ever since we stumbled into civilisation.

Swimming up through their dark dream, the drag decays our orbit. 

Everything heaves and yaws and is a distraction, but amid the nausea

we know we will meet Hypatia yet, upon the Moon,

and dance in the garden of numbers.

The barrel's epicycle waltzes me across the room. 

Raw, I leave my skin stuck inside, lining the barbed barrel,

and in a red slick of truth and vindication 

I slide upon the floor. I wear a wire crown 

which too many wore before, and crawl. 

Slack and tight my muscles seek and fail. 

I forget my crime even in the instant I am fist-reminded once again. 

And yet a beautiful woman was once pulled from her chariot by men, 

in the name of God. We will meet, beyond exhaustion: 

I saw her smile once before, in a dream we shared.

Election day

Dogs on pedestals bark at each other.

We tell ourselves stories to persuade ourselves

that what we tolerate is indeed tolerable.

The landfill reeks. The city is a scaffold

made from the bones of industries milked dry, 

stripped bare, and abandoned to obsolescence

so that the rich may keep their treasure. 

There once was a chapel where Teneu's bones lay:

sister of Gawain, mother of Mungo, lost now

beneath shops at the mall that bears her name 

where we perform the modern mysteries of wealth  

and celebrate the tyranny of meaningless choice,

the triumph of appetite over understanding, 

and then we return to dwellings of mind and mud, 

and eat luminous food without flavour

and raise a glass to heroes who have betrayed us,

as all eventually do, and generate the waste

by which our wealth is measured, and as the debris 

and jetsam of consumption accumulates in piles,

a dog climbs up on each separate heap and barks,

and we get to choose which one barks best.