Stephen Gilfedder: ‘Christ in the Freezer’ and ‘Ironman’

Christ in the Freezer
On the day of the Port Arthur massacre

On a not-so-good Sunday the twenty-eighth of April
we raise the last of this year’s hot cross buns
well past their use-by date, the rows of Easter hosts
brought from body bags, lying cryogenic on the racks.
We break them off in multiples for the netball kids
in an echoing galley turning dark with a television
irradiating news in a language we are yet to learn.
Muted now we watch the crawler on the screen
adding to the numbers covering the landscape.
I hand out the revived offerings like communion,
part father, part sembling priest for each person
old and young gunned down among the ruins,
these hosts re-created to perfection, the afterlife
cheated, seeming casualties reborn into life itself.
Only one is left, covered and returned to its cell,
pathetic body of Christ hidden from the light.

Stephen Gilfedder

Ironman
for Roger Donazzan

I have survived two children and the never-never,
Resisted tattooists and purveyors…