Home » Poems, Secret Lives of the Colonial Poets

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 
Cordite 28.1: Mulloway online October 2008

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