Whataboutisms

 

geopolitical fractures

mapped onto cultural fault-

 

lines breaking across stanzas

unfurling a fury of witness

 

enjambed in white spaces

homeland the bedrock

 

metaphor of cosmopolitanism

satellite vision of rubble

 

the global lingua franca

as poets fret neoliberal

 

adventures in identity politics

offering lessons in empathy

 

stretched thin across the globe

those murdered in the name

 

of Aryanism now a spectre

of settler colonialism

 

suspended university protests

deaths on the streets of Minneapolis

 

rolling Darfur genocide in Sudan

forced sterilisations in Xinjiang

 

children shipped out of Ukraine

for indoctrination

 

all clamouring for poems

drowned in drones and blazing

 

fuel tankers painting the oceans

like AI-generated William Turners

 

as litanies of Palestinian histories

meet our first nations in police crackdowns

 

festival cancellations, prize-circuit publications

and cycles of misinformation

 

where charges of whataboutism

are wielded like missile defence systems.

 

 

 

 Opera House Apocalypse

 

Has no-one ever written an Opera House poem?

I mean, one dedicated to the house itself, those

hollowed-out bones masquerading as sails

that jagged collection of sea shells jutting

from a bucket at the end of a promenade?

 

Poets ought to cut their teeth on that grubby

stack of dishes rinsed by the sun, those bleached   

segments of orange aching for rearrangement

the way a Romantic poet lives or dies by the

falling leaves of their melancholy odes to Autumn.

 

Sure, the house crops up as a support act

over the decades, those famous scalloped curves     

mentioned and described and metaphorised

in any number of verses about the harbour

but a poem of its own? Perhaps that will come

 

from some mute, inglorious Utzon jostled amidst

a gaggle of selfie-sticks, recalling that red scribble of

anti-war scrubbed clean from its scales while gazing

at the hoods of the house now spattered with

light shows, billboard for a horse race, vivid

spillage of political messaging. Or from a distance

 

where the steps of the edifice speak to a white-washed past

of ceremonial ribbons snipped on black and white television

even as its carapace projects a glimpse of the apocalypse:

that set of broken teeth, those bleached crab claws

shattered remnants of the millennium collapsed,

sand-encrusted, into the dried-out husk of the harbour

 

dredging a backwards echo through that old colonial fort

on its bed of rubble, to the hut for Bennelong, ill-heeded voice

of the unceded, to the original sails: clatter of oyster shells

gathered into piles by Gadigal locals on a quiet tidal island.