Les Murray Poems

The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
...

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
...

Inside Ayers Rock is lit
with paired fluorescent lights
on steel pillars supporting the ceiling
of haze-blue marquee cloth
...

Us all sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
...

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
...

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
...

The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.
...

Mid-9th century

Good-looking young man
in your Crimean shirt
...

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
...

Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
...