Les Murray

Humans are flown, or fall;

We’re down with the gravity-stemmers,rare, thick-boned, often basso.Most animals above the tides are airborne.Typically tuned keen, theythrow the ground away with wire feetand swoop rings round it.Magpies, listening askancefor their food in and under lawn,strut so hair-trigger they almostdangle on earth, out of the air.Nearly anything can make theirtailcoats break into wings.

The Cows on Killing Day

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling stillfrom that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouthsthat gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,the…

Clean water in the house

outside. Drinking the earth.His pile, being perfect,ignores the misting rain.A charcoal Russianhe opens his mouth like other catsand mimes a greeting mew.At one bound top-speed acrossthe lawn and halfway upthe zippy pear tree. Why? Branches?Stopping puzzles him.Eloquent of purror indignant tailhe politely hates to be picked up.His human friend never does it.He finds a voicein…

When yellow leaves the sky

to go on making redand warm and floral and brownbut gradually people tire of it,return it inside metal, and goto be dark and breathe water colours.Some yellow hangs on outsideforlornly tethered to posts.Cars chase their own supply.When we went down the hollowunder the stormcloud nationsthe light was generalised therefrom vague glass places in the treesand…

The body had a nightmare.

No need of light, to keep hipsand shoulders rotating in bedon the gimbals of wet eyes.Pounding heart, chest pains –should it be the right arm hurting?The brain was a voidor a blasted-out chamber –shreds of speech in there,shatters of lust and prayer.No one can face their heartor turn their back on it.Bowel stumbled to bowl,emptied,…

At full tilt, air gleamed –

snatched up, lay on my palmstill beating faintly.Slowly, a tinctureof whatever consciousness isinfused its tremor, andram beak wide as scissorsall hurt loganberry inside,it crept over my knuckleand took my outstretched fingerin its wire foot-rings.Cobalt wings, shutting on beigebody. Gold under-eye whiskers,beak closing in recoveryit faced outward from me.For maybe twenty minuteswe sat together, one on…