The First Letter
I am not going to praise your poetry to you
B. O’D.
BUT! you make the leaves & the grasses speak for themselves! great scald of demos i am yours! master bending down to meh! like a tree of man your mighty river flows through days your poems like a dripping tap & i a drum that tap must fill! restless spirits stranded somewhere in the reeds by a riverbank we will walk on my prophet after you have dunked my head & blessed meh made meh drink the brown river water’s silt the fury of our resistance to imperial drones master! none shall stand before us (none! & no danger from our gentle hands (apostles walking together our hands brush gently the grasses rushes our secret lives rising up like nations to be counted among the new & old this democracy! of our own making! bard of wisdom & of long summer days in libraries lit by a stained glass sun reading your poems arrayed in battle formations line after line of soldiers' language & orders we cannot hear for the rushing sounds of rivers finally leaping free of drought (grey father of my new religion of men & words that flow like rivers of milk from she-oak trunks river gums & swarms of pollen bee- seas & our fingers sticky with that love
