Last Breath of an Unknown Soldier, at Canakkale

How simple in the end: to smell the vinegar of an infant’s head
this blink: how different to the beginning,
when the whole world collapses
to a baby’s cry.
Know the pomegranate cheated
with hibiscus flowers,
and siren ficifolia recruited through
marooned stars falling in
an aureole of shell bursts

(the blue mosque unseen
the famous river past the cliché of artists,
but we couldn’t elude the gum leaves
languidly revolving in their own smell;
I wanted to be the fat magpie
lolloping in the greed of water,
where silver eyes so jealously wait their turn)

Crusader’s foolish pose of vigil
thrown down on Dardanelles steps
sighted by Hellespont drowning,
this slow breath of nationality
is more than alien imperial tales
adjudicating the division of souls,
sand absorbs the running of memory
those ripple lines of being
lapping anthems to the billeting stanza

(so near that silly point
my fingertips could touch you my enemy
our embarking coronas entwined like lovers,
now that we understand all the secrets
the last notes home in bugle spit
who ever thought of the stop over pyramids
and these trenches in such willing stupidity)

There is space in my sigh for us all

Too scarce now to want to be visible,
sear my heart into the banksia –
my old nose the wasted cone
that stubs the unwary toe.
Our sun had always wanted me
a familiar smudge in any landscape,
captured in stained glass federation
the cuckoo shrike shatters the gargoyles
breaches all callistemon flying buttresses

(I know your name, I know your name).

From the anthology ‘To End all Wars’ edited by Allison, Couani, Kelen, and Wicks, Puncher and Wattman 2018.

‘Abandoned Soliloquies’ UnCollected Press 2019.