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Backyard

These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Late Night Radio, Polygon Press, Edinburgh, 1998.






Listen to the Poet Read

 The God of Smoke listens idly in the heat

      to the barbecue sausages

speaking the language of rain deceitfully

      as their fat dances.

Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky shelters

      its threatening weather.

A screen door slams, and the kids come tumbling

      out of their arguments,

and the barrage of shouting begins, concerning

      young Sandra and Scott

and the broken badminton racquet and net

      and the burning meat.

Is that a fifties home movie, or the real

      thing? Heavens, how

a child and a beach ball in natural colour

      can break your heart.

And the brown dog worries the khaki grass

      to stop it from growing

in place of his worship, the burying bone.

      The bone that stinks.

Turn now to the God of this tattered arena

      watching over the rites of passage -

marriage, separation; adolescence

      and troubled maturity:

having served under that bright sky you may look up

      but don't ask too much:

some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon,

      a Southerly Buster at dusk.
 

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