The Community Garden
The cracked thumb
of an earth-stained hand
is rolling a seed against
an index finger.
That seed will germinate, flower, and bear fruit.
From crates the fruit will be sold
then sliced and carried under soft candle light,
by black suits, to small tables
where under cream
it will be injected with a fork.
In department stores
our hands stab at racks and price tags,
while beyond the ocean
one needle amongst an avenue
of sewing machines,
comes to a pause,
and a callused finger
rolls thread
across a thumb.
Mathematics
Raw, intricate; left of the equals sign
are algebraic functions not yet confined
by veiled, patient and terse right hand sides.
Poets toil as they strive long to refine
life’s complex functions into fourteen lines,
often giving up when their attempts are denied;
scratched out theorems, sweaty palms, lost time;
leaving blackboards with chalk-tries spreading wide.
Poets, don’t quit you must hope for your poems.
Did Pythagoras summarize chaos to gold?
Did Fibonacci find elegance in the flower?
Ratios were found for shells spirally grown,
A sequence was present in petals, behold,
for expression, terse lines do have a power.
Wikipedia
In a house on Newtown
on a Friday evening,
I met one man, who was from Albania
then Kosovo, then Montenegro
With an arm like a weathervane,
he explained that he now lives
up on McArthur Street .
Eventually I understood enough
to ask him if he was a refugee,
he nodded in Albanian.
I retrieved
six children from his vocabulary,
and St John’s
then his lexicon grew.
He told me: I work
-flails his arms- feed Horses,
-smoothes out an invisible beard-
-aims an invisible scope -
No work. You go back.
10 years, Big camp.
He sighs. Our
I can read about it on the internet,
then suggests that the Albanian
should drive me home now.
We get into his Honda, and he fluently
does a three point turn, accelerates,
comes to a full stop at the intersection,
and follows my hands; left, straight, left.
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