LINES FROM A QUIET ISLAND

by David Mason

Sydney Morning Herald, March 24, 2017

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.

THE ERROR

by David Mason

Aeon-Uranus, Gaea, Carpi, Horae and Prometheus, Greco-Roman mosaic, Damascus Museum via Theoi Greek Mythology

So much descends from the sky
and rises to it, Ouranos to the Greeks
in a mistaken myth. So much descends
and rises, rain and prayers, errors
and Eros with his wings and arrows.
Man-god, mistake, the sky
is woman, womb of all weathers,
and what descends from that first mistake
is the line of all-white men in ties
of righteousness, stupidity and lack
of any understanding of the world.
They fall in line, sit in judgment.
They reject. They cut and dig
for dollars made of dead things
pressed for a billion years.
They who believe the myth
of Ouranos can’t see the clouds
as bellies giving birth to rain,
can’t feel the tears
of anyone but themselves.


David Mason is an American poet living in Tasmania.