Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (0)
Dead Stingray
Prone on the sod, like a wax figurine drying in the sun,
dusted with the leathery rubbery sheen of slow decay,
you surprise the postie on his route and the schoolgirl
daydreaming her way home, dead stingray, out of your depth.
The buffalo grass on the nature strip is an itchy place,
where dogs defecate and myna birds strong-arm sparrows;
the daylight surrounds you with its astringent glare, and
passing cars expel remains of burnt fossil plankton and algae.
Once there was a liquid sky, high above the clement waves,
and you swept across an unseen fecund bed of oozing sand,
your limber pectoral strength and grace, lissom and arabesque,
delicate and deadly barbed, equipped with special sensing organs.
Now your eyes congeal by the roadside, adrift in a pointless death,
while people wait in fear, for the rising water to come.
Jason Beale
After School
It’s late afternoon—after school,
and the children are on the swing
and trampoline, gilded in gold
by an orange Sun.
The western dome is a proscenium
lit for a play, and a cool wind
is blowing from the east,
making the trees talk.
A passing police car, siren on,
is replaced by the cries of
peevish parrots, then some
sulphur-crested cockatoos.
I forget myself for once,
watching cumulus float along
like eternal thoughts, as empty
as smoke and as high as love.
Jason Beale
In Unison
It quietly begins in a realm of confusion
where desires whisper ancient tongues,
and bit by bit, the greyish dawn of reason
laconically reveals itself, glimmering like
a lost coin over the horizon of sleep.
Then out of the unseen a gentle breeze
brushes our faces, light as spring feathers,
and we wake to the pressure of sheets
on bare torsos, hips, haunches, and thighs,
blood pulsing in our bodies’ compass points.
The itch of existence now rises in the mind,
dragging memory for the meaning of this,
lying here in unison, a secret of the Earth,
your exquisite beauty made of the dust
our ancestors shed, seeking for the divine.
Jason Beale
