All Poems
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Flowering Eucalypt In Autumn
© Les Murray
That slim creek out of the sky
the dried-blood western gum tree
is all stir in its high reaches:
Towards The Imminent Days (Section 4)
© Les Murray
But our talk is cattle and cricket. My quiet uncle
has spent the whole forenoon sailing a stump-ridden field
of blady-grass and Pleistocene clay never ploughed
since the world's beginning. The Georgic furrow lengthens
Cockspur Bush
© Les Murray
I am lived. I am died.
I was two-leafed three times, and grazed,
but then I was stemmed and multiplied,
sharp-thorned and caned, nested and raised,
The Images Alone
© Les Murray
Scarlet as the cloth draped over a sword,
white as steaming rice, blue as leschenaultia,
old curried towns, the frog in its green human skin;
a ploughman walking his furrow as if in irons, but
The Mowed Hollow
© Les Murray
Some yellow hangs on outside
forlornly tethered to posts.
Cars chase their own supply.
Aurora Prone
© Les Murray
The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
The Harleys
© Les Murray
Blats booted to blatant
dubbing the avenue dire
with rubbings of Sveinn Forkbeard
leading a black squall of Harleys
Performance
© Les Murray
I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,
a rocket that wriggled up and shot
Predawn In Health
© Les Murray
The stars are filtering through a tree
outside in the moon's silent era.
Reality is moving layer over layer
On The Borders
© Les Murray
We're driving across tableland
somewhere in the world;
it is almost bare of trees.
To Fly In Just Your Suit
© Les Murray
Humans are flown, or fall;
humans can't fly.
We're down with the gravity-stemmers,
rare, thick-boned, often basso.
The Butter Factory
© Les Murray
It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.
The Sleepout
© Les Murray
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing
swelled the blind on its timber boom
Music To Me Is Like Days
© Les Murray
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
The Quality Of Sprawl
© Les Murray
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Inside Ayers Rock
© Les Murray
Inside Ayers Rock is lit
with paired fluorescent lights
on steel pillars supporting the ceiling
of haze-blue marquee cloth
Amanda's Painting
© Les Murray
In the painting, I'm seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I'm
Shower
© Les Murray
From the metal poppy
this good blast of trance
arriving as shock, private cloudburst blazing down,
worst in a boarding-house greased tub, or a barrack with competitions,
The New Hieroglyphics
© Les Murray
In the World language, sometimes called
Airport Road, a thinks balloon with a gondola
under it is a symbol for speculation.
On Home Beaches
© Les Murray
Back, in my fifties, fatter that I was then,
I step on the sand, belch down slight horror to walk
a wincing pit edge, waiting for the pistol shot
laughter. Long greening waves cash themselves, foam change
