Les Murray Poems

The smallest girl
in the wild kid's gang
submitted her finger
to his tomahawk idea -
...

Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword,
white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
...

I am lived. I am died.
I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,
but then I was stemmed and multiplied,
sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,
...

We're driving across tableland
somewhere in the world;
it is almost bare of trees.
...

In the painting, I'm seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I'm
...

Blats booted to blatant
dubbing the avenue dire
with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard
leading a black squall of Harleys
...

At full tilt, air gleamed -
and a window-struck kingfisher,
snatched up, lay on my palm
still beating faintly.
...

When yellow leaves the sky
they pipe it to the houses
to go on making red
and warm and floral and brown
...

Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing
swelled the blind on its timber boom
...

Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals;
they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative,
not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets
and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids
...