Les Murray: Frederick Arnall
Frederick Arnall
Son of a fugitive
alderman from Cornwall
my grandfather Fred
took up the shovel
in his early teens
to extract khaki alunite
from an upside-down mine
tunnelled inside a mountain
and send it cascading
down into commerce
as alum, the medicine that
fixed colours in cloth.
Marrying, he moved south
to dig refractive coal,
tarry fossil rock that still
powers half our world
and wrecks lung tissue. Did his,
dead at fifty. Wish we’d met.
Irony of coal, how it
synthesized Nature’s hues.
Irony of his tallness
that raked him, and of
his deep ancestry, that made
me ten percent a Spaniard
by the DNA I’d had
checked out in racial times,
no Koori as half hoped
but sherry Castellano
job-hunting long ago
across the Biscayne sea.
Les Murray
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.
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6 mins
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23 mins
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2 mins