Les Brighton Poems

We will not weep for her:
Through tears, God’s gift, the heart clear-eyed in praise
Reaches back for a young girl
Growing straight and tall in nor’west weather.
...

At 900 kilometres an hour I am falling
Falling down hedges and fields
Falling down highways and towns.
Across the hammered and harbourless sea
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You are a child of the Creator God:
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you
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Azaleas crackle and spit
Like a fire of twigs
Or a summer-full of broom-pods on a day of heat.
Their tiny fists unclench, palm up
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What do they think
Up there on the flight deck
Drawing these four hundred lives on through the dark
At 30,000 feet over Europe?
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Sunlight in an empty room
Wind in the eucalypts
In the school playground children call
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Out of the smog-shrouded city.
After the brash shop-windows of the town,
The endless dreary suburbs.
Mocking laughter down blank alleys,
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The sun rises with a roar:
The bowl shatters, and each shard singing.
Faster than eye can follow
Light gathers pasture and cowshed and windbreak
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Spring, like a wave, catches one unawares, spray-shocks.
Fluorescent-lit offices have no seasons. Townsfolk do not mark the tides.
They keep their time, still. Buried in bedrock the ring laser registers
The gentle tug and easing deep in the roots of the hills.
...