When you have left, beginning to look back,
you can see everything they covered up,
the iron of neighborhood, the layered hates.
Men go armed to market. They do not talk,
though lips move, emitting sounds like fists.
The commentators say the nation’s mad
yet too few get up from a chair and move.
There are no pitchforks, torches at the gates,
and all the lowered eyes look very sad.
The statues might have warned us this could happen,
those noble men accustomed to their slaves,
those domes and obelisks and public greens.
Now an island lies at peace in a southern sea
with well-kept paddocks, trees of cockatoos,
the stirring of a clerk in the bottle shop.
Here monuments, like peoples’ homes, are small.
You set out never wanting to look back.
You do look back. You look and try to breathe.
And if you think you’ve found your perfect island,
think further to what you do not see or hear.
There hasn’t been a change in human nature.
Here too the ammunition clip has clicked
crisply into the automatic rifle.
So quiet you can hear dead children scream.
David Mason is an American poet living in Tasmania.
