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- Contents Category: Poem
- Custom Article Title: ‘Other Eminent Hands’, a new poem
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- Article Title: Other Eminent Hands
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- Custom Highlight Text:
And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind,
Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d:
The sun with rays, directly darting down,
Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone:
The two beneath the distant poles, complain
Of endless winter, and perpetual rain.
Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold
The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.Ovid via John Dryden*
It’s a mantra, isn’t it? Now a gifting
of the driest six months here in 150 years –
‘since records began’,
which the panting
wagtail calls a grotesque expression.
Change is many of us working hand
over hand, making
stands or semi-forgetting.
We’ve arrived from a wet zone wetter
than usual, and this is the drift. Creation
swelling or cracking
in every realm. Remember
the funnels collecting smutty rain,
the swaying of tall trees till they split.
And now any roots
unable to reach below
the outer shell withering in the dark,
or lit up when those cracks reach down.
Either way. Eventually,
we’ll rid language of words
of change or words of weather, we’ll
acclimatise to whatever binds lives
from end to end.
Other eminent hands
will pretend translation when they
are remaking in own images. An
Easter Monday
and the road toll rises.
An Easter Monday and blue trees wilt.
A woman asleep or collapsed on the street
of a country town
stares horizontal
towards the railway line and its post-
flood traffic of intercontinental supplies.
In this small town are 26 people
homeless ... and counting.
Other people are enjoying the holiday –
an easy day-trip from the city. It’s hot
but not chronically hot
as it has been. This new
beginning. This continuation. The river
cradle forgetting what it can hold,
and their eminences
searching out a word
that incorporates ‘sun’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘profit’,
‘prophet’, ‘business’, ‘rain’, ‘dryness’, and love.
*From Metamorphoses ‘translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other eminent hands’ [https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/EtAlia/ovidmeta.html]
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