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Poetry
by Barry O'Donohue
MY
BACK YARD
I look out from my back porch onto the
park
and see the dusk sky slowly settle in the west.
Magpies swoop and swerve between the trees
in their indigenous dance
not on alert
but simply playing as nesting is months away.
A filigree of tree branches break up the sky
so that I could be in an art exhibition
on a similar theme but it is just trees
just a park brimming with life.
As the sun goes down I swim in the belief
that the world is a simple place - no religious dogma
no politics
just a simple polygraph of endurance.
I ache for something more but the sun and my pain
set beyond the ridge line
and I slump into a paradigm
of indifference
or slowly burgeoning indecision.
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MY
BURB
To take a line from America…yeah,
well, y'all come back
to these suburbs with veneer walls,
with mottled front lawns
and charcoal bar-b-cues and friendship shit,
to four wheel drives and kids on trikes
or frothing Barbies hair in the dog bowl,
yes, we come here some time to vege and to question.
Lawn grubs rule at certain times of the year
while closure is a sentimental thing
that women do around the end of spring
when back yards are full of neighbours
and when the youth within us cries out for solitude,
a queen sized bed, a lock on the door,
or just to have the kids watching whatever.
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GETTING
DOWN TO THE CHILI
We begin to eat our Tibetan soup,
fresh flavours cross our tongues
like tides across sand bars, the ebb and flow,
the debris of its weight
a welcome reprieve from hunger.
Chicken and assorted vegetables
are flavoured by spice, newly down from the high lands,
coming across tundra and shale, snow and spindly grass
to rest in our bowls. Tibet sings here on our lips,
swims like a slow racer in our eyes and one wish
for independence becomes a chant in the back of my skull.
With freedom I take down the soup
and appreciate its delicate interplay, its mystery,
just to discover that down towards the bottom
small slices of chili wait
as if an ambush of red hot is imminent
on my ambiguous tongue
waiting too far away and also too close.
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