Cull Ex Libris
They are culling entire libraries.
The landfill is encyclopedic,
A humus thick with sentences,
A decaying marl of chapter and verse.
They are purging large imaginations,
A universe of arcane equations,
Giant stands of hard philosophy,
Piling up in the moon-dazzled fens,
Turning tomes of theology to sudd,
Small quatrains floating like debris,
Poetry drowning in the viscous mud,
Dewey’s decimals deconstructed.
They are tearing pages from spines,
Dust-jackets wind-gusted like leaves,
A detritus of indexes in the gullies.
The night sky is as black as ink,
Chronicles of days numbered like pages,
Acknowledgements bleaching in the sun,
Confirming the death of the author,
A lament and legacy for the ages.
Prefaces are stacked in deep shadows,
Afterwords lingering like memory,
Facts and themes bulldozed as rubble.
They are culling entire libraries.
Rod Moran
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins