PARALLEL PARITY

       Sydney                                                           

                                                                                     

       

Three weeks and my milk is in

and Lucas is feeding well

and I am learning

the soft tug of his suck

his smell and his opened eye,

his jerky movements

his tiny penis and his skin of silk.

My vagina is healing

and my strength returning.

If Megan were to hold him

close for hours

I think that her breasts too

would soon

yield milk.

When we decided to marry

we had not discussed a child

but after two years we decided

and our dear friend

Hugh provided sperm:

I wonder what relationship

might develop between him

and his sort-of son?

                                  

Somalia

Three weeks and tomorrow
Ashkir will die. 
I have no milk.
The soldiers at the camp
have no interest in babies
and the famine continues
for us but not for them.


Ashkir was conceived
on a drunken raid one night:
soldiers – ‘guarding our camp’!
One whose name I never heard
swaggered, rattling with strings of 
ammunition, laughed and jumped me:
there was no help.


I shall follow Ashkir soon.
I still lose blood
and grow weaker.
I’ve seen
many mothers die.
I wait.
Next week I would
have turned fourteen.

MORNING

It comes softly

moving aside clouds

as gently as a lover

opens his sleeping partner’s eyes

with a finger and a smile;

eyes that were closed like doors 

of a theatre where dark dramas

played out on the stage

of deepest imagination,

complicated thoughts, dreams of fright,

of agendas of anxious meetings

that fail, of lost parents, children,

passports, of flying in planes

between tall buildings

not far above the ground.  

                 

What we see we see with eyes

like fingers that can play

the keys of only one octave

of six pianos side by side

that make up the electromagnetic band.

To right and left are infra ultra red

and violet waves, of radio and x,

that wash up foreign scripts

in flasks made from rare metals –

peridium, lucidanium – and alloys

unknown in our solar system,

forged ten trillion years ago

at the time of star formation

and galactic collision.

Perhaps our brains that sweat

and toil at night  

sense directly messages

from these sources

or instead, like the strange fish

that live in freezing or boiling

waters a mile deep – bioluminescent –

their large eyes comprised

of several retinal layers,

see only by their own pale light?

The light comes softly,

moving aside the night

with its alien invasions of the mind

nightmares and alarms,

resolutions, fabrications,

decisions that don’t last

and palpitations.

LIBERTY

This was once New York –

this desert so extensive,

so grey it could be

the moon –

I was told this

by the only man

I’ve seen

for days.

I don’t know

how many of us remain.

Desert –

and this massive

head, broken from its neck,

bearing a bent diadem,

an aureole

of the seven seas,

the seven continents and seven rays

of the unrelenting sun.

EPIPHANY

Rex and John, both Australian neurosurgeons, were attending a conference in Oxford.

That high summer day on the deck

of the Head of the River,

relaxed by his Ploughman’s Lunch and ale,

Rex looked into the cloudless sky,

saw several far-off small black dots:

maybe Canada geese, if not,

maybe, he smiled, a replay

of the Battle of Britain

Hard to be certain …

But the dots stood still.

Rex set down his glass,

stunned by rapid-fire thoughts

of probabilities.

“I think,” he said quietly to John

“I have secondaries in my brain.”

Ten years ago Rex had

a melanoma on his back.

There were questions then.

“One never knows,”

his surgeon said.

“Are you sure they’re not floaters?”

Rex closed each eye in turn.

“Positive.” he said.

“Migraine aura?” 

“Never before.”

Rex knew the drill.

For a decade he had savoured each day,

freed it from bureaucracy and strife.

Fancy him, a wise man from the east,

receiving this epiphany in Oxford –

Oxford, home of Tolkien

and other master weavers of fantasy –

this clear, prosaic sentence!

How ironic that its execution

would be inside his head!

“I think that we should finish lunch,”

Rex said slowly.

John touched his arm.

Both turned again to their cheese, meat

and bread, emptied their glasses

and left with the calm they assumed

as they emerged from theatre,

weary with effort, seeking

relatives in the waiting room

desperate for news of a miracle,

to confess that it was not within their powers

to remove all their loved one’s tumour

though they’d tried for hours.