1999

I find that it is exactly five years since I wrote this, and it has been a long time since I have put up anything even vaguely like a poem, and "vaguely like a poem" describes this pretty well:

If you had asked me how I felt yesterday morning, I would have said
(were I not timid, knowing myself to be a craven, a poltroon)
“Nine parts Walt Whitman to one part Osama ben Laden”
(will any of you remember those names on December 18th, 2999, children of my children’s children?)

Some days the beggars at Redfern station are infinitely precious to me, their faces and their voices and their ethereal lies.
The dance of the Filipino Baptists in their carpark, moving backward and forward and backward again, each in turn, until each car has made its way out.
The men with crutches, the men whose gaits are strange, who look down always, who I see on the footpath outside the coffee and nut shop.
The women who do not look weak, not in the least, the women in the hijab, who make me think of Kipling:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
and the women come down to cut up what remains
just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your God like a soldier

All of these are precious to me.

Some days I can see the Spirit of God hovering over every person I see, every silent passenger, every jogger glimpsed out the window for a half-second, every infant passed by incomprehending as I am swept along by the inrushing or outrushing human tide on Abercrombie street.
I see the face of God in the tired faces of the old men in Ramadan, in the square-jawed young men from Utah with mandarin nametags - in the little girl whose mother is feeding her peanuts from a paper bag, in the empty lullaby of the quatschen of the city office girls.

The names of the twelve stations and their waiting crowds are like the verses and the notes in a great hymn of praise.

Bless and keep them all, Lord God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

And it struck me as I arrived at my place of work yesterday morning that joy and rage are less than a hair’s breadth apart in my being, and one is always mixed with the other.
If you are Walt Whitman, all is good in itself, whatever it is, and joy is just joy.
But if you are one part Osama ben Laden, if you believe that a flaw is a flaw, that no man is good but God alone, that suffering is real suffering and despair is real despair,
then the joy and the pity and the rage, the thirst for goodness and the hatred of the dark,
are only one thing, one thing, one thing.