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
