Seething since 2000*
Sunbathing
This poem first appeared in Overland (2008) and was anthologized in Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011).
will only say that your your hint re sunbaths
—Bernard O’Dowd to Walt Whitman
has saved meh many a day’s illness
i shall take sunbaths & eat stone fruit from the goulburn valley reading your lines again my beloved my only one my sun for you i shall compose letters lines verses song cycles people will eat oranges & know that you & i are one oh my mouth full of pips I shall spit out words & watch them there in the grass speckled & wet & the galahs will circle above us wheeling & shrieking all through the evening's long denouement pray they can hear us in our nests of wisdom squawking in our new language each breath a southerly change or a billowing tent of dust in cathedrals we shall linger together preach at coat-tails of strangers bellow at believers & those they call 'godless' in glades of deception for ours is a new world master a world made of people not based on colour unless it be the colour of rivers & blood still in veins or of the sand in glass or the wind through grass & if cancer has a colour let us eradicate it from our rainbow we'll make new sounds spoken by leaves that people can actually read