Les Murray: Two Poems

Parental Job Swap

Sitting next to his flagon

on the morning stairs,

his wife on the bus

lovingly escaping eight children.

He hiccups the courage to go

to his emptied duties

and stay drunk enough to hold on

there while assuring dismissal—

he remembers that his wife

has finally taken her own job

and the bus, continually promoted,

dark jacket to silk-cream jacket,

rumbles like his gut in the day.

He, falling over his flagon

has suffered the good disaster

as his wife is promoted yet again

through the roof, above the children

who had been shielding him

as he dreams unpaid FM

world music; eee limo limo

her bus has been promoted

to two teenagers driving him

in her limo to his shrink

in hiccups, to drain his flagon.

Les Murray

The Invention of Pigs

Come our one great bushfire

pigs, sty-released, declined to quit

their pavements of dried clay and shit.

Other beasts went headlong, nipping

off with genitals clenched high.

Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping.

Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping

grass at their heels and on by,

too swift to ignite any houses.

One horse baked in a tin shed.

After, a few pigs lay smoke-dead

but where flames had leaned in on

sty timbers and let others flee

fuzzy white hoofprints crowded

upwind over black, BBB.

No escapers stayed feral in our region.

Les Murray