Rod Moran: Two Poems

The Balkans
(For Ismail Kadare)

Ancestors compel them to homicide,

The long dead still conniving at death,

A moon shining like a butcher’s blade.

The village has its keeper of the blood,

A clerk of the enduring vendettas,

Liabilities in a woman’s beauty.

Falling in love can entail lethal risks.

Honour involves a calculus of murder,

(There are stone bolt-holes for fugitives

Scattered like tombs across the landscape).

Islam’s onrush was envelopment,

Ustasha’s domain then Peking’s outpost,

Modern overlays on the ancient order.

History holds their malevolent code,

And the frigid screes bleed on demand

When a pale rider crosses the border.

Rod Moran

Suburban Traces

The old market gardens gave way

To a modernity of sub-divisions.

Stacked tomato trellises were burnt,

Humus stripped and contours leveled,

Nearby wetlands systematically filled.

Moorhens undertook aqua-migrations,

Other beckoning waters shining.

A new compelling habitat emerged,

An ecology of function and comfort.

At night, a high polar moon glinted

From cubist glass and balconies of chrome,

Domiciles of warm domestic order.

Yet, something of the past survived, too,

Perhaps coded in the landscape’s memory,

Suggestions of a rustic origin—

Aniseed growing wild by the freeway,

Sunflowers ablaze in a suburban yard,

A filigree of antique grape-vines,

The occasional tattoo of homing egrets

Across a sky glowing blue as lupins,

that small olive grove in a local park,

A trace of umber peat on the breeze.

Rod Moran