Those little violences

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Are washed away so gently in the shower, its unsightly mould remaining with the fuzzy hangover.

I remember Amy saying she would see me three months from then, my heart all smashed open and ready to let all this new stuff come flooding in. She held my hand and looked shamanic loopy, I laughed.

At the time.

The busker plays a jangly version of Heart of Gold. The sky is very blue and clear.

Apologies to Auden for the line breaks.
—-

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters;
how well, they understood
Its human position;
how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Eleanor Jackson's avatar

By Eleanor Jackson

Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, arts producer, cyclist, writer, gal about town, feminist, freewheeler, and friend.

2 comments

  1. Musee des Beaus Arts is one of my favourites from Auden. I had it memorised in high school.

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