Andrew Lansdown

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Les Murray

 

Three poems by Les Murray:

1. “The Broad Bean Sermon”

2. “Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn”

3. “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow”

 

 

The Broad Bean Sermon

 

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade

without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,

recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

 

Upright with water like men, square in stem-section

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,

kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

 

Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest

snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through Escher’s three worlds,

spiders tense and sag like little black flags in cordage.

 

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find

plenty, and fetch them.  An hour or a cloud later

you find shirtfulls more.  At every hour of daylight

 

appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,

thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,

beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

 

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers

in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice

that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

 

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or

do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality

like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

 

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string

and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,

the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …

 

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness

—it is your health—you vow to pick them all

even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

            from Selected Poems: The Vernacular Republic

            © Les Murray

 

 

 

Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn

 

That slim creek out of the sky

the dried-blood western gum tree

is all stir in its high reaches:

 

its strung haze-blue foliage is dancing

points down in breezy mobs, swapping

pace and place in an all-over sway

 

retarded en masse by crimson blossom.

Bees still at work up there tack

around their exploded furry likeness

 

and the lawn underneath’s a napped rug

of eyelash drift, of blooms flared

like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril,

 

minute urns, pinch-sized rockets

knocked down by winds, by night-creaking

fig-squirting bats, or the daily

 

parrot gang with green pocketknife wings.

Bristling food tough delicate

raucous life, each flower comes

 

as a spray in its own turned vase,

a taut starbust, honeyed model

of the tree’s fragrance crisping in your head.

 

When the Japanese plum tree

was shedding in spring, we speculated

there among the drizzling petals

 

what kind of exquisitely precious

artistic bloom might be gendered

in a pure ethereal compost

 

of petals potted as they fell.

From unpetalled gun-debris

we know what is grown continually,

 

a tower of fabulous swish tatters,

a map hoisted upright, a crusted

riverbed with up-country show towns.

           from The People’s Otherworld

            © Les Murray

 

 

 

An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

 

The word goes round Repins,

the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,

at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,

the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands

and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:

There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him.

 

The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile

and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk

and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets

which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:

There’s a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.

 

The man we surround, the man no one approaches

simply weeps, and does not cover it, weeps

not like a child, not like the wind, like a man

and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even

sob very loudly—yet the dignity of his weeping

 

holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him

in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,

and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him

stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds

longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

 

Some will say, in the years to come, a halo

or force stood around him. There is no such thing.

Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him

but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,

the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us

 

trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected

judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream

who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children

and such as look out of Paradise come near him

and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

 

Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops

his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit—

and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand

and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;

as many as follow her also receive it

 

and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more

refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,

but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,

the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out

of his writhen face and ordinary body

 

not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,

hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea—

and when he stops, he simply walks between us

mopping his face with the dignity of one

man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

 

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

            from The Weatherboard Cathedral

            © Les Murray

 

Read more of Les Murray’s poems on his official website:

http://www.lesmurray.org

 

 

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