Requiem

 

Perhaps those archetypes of immortality,

the beautiful doomed,

have a story to tell after all:

That there is only now.

No golden afternoon just gone.

No promise of a silver morning.

That they are not forever young,

suspended in telegenic animation,

but forever dead instead.

That, unless phrenology has moved on

from the so-called science of the mind

to yet another mismeasure of mankind,

the dead are beyond our vanities.

And that, if anything matters,

if anything does in the long, slow fuck of life—

a car crash in time lapse

where our family sedan slews off the shoulder of the highway,

  over and down,

         down and over

the embankment,

gathering turds of sod in its seams

as it gathers momentum towards a barbed-wire fence

fencing in a gouged creek and orchards burned grey

by salt—

If there is anything to be learned

from these revolutions,

these guttural exclamations,

as our bodies penetrate other bodies

—are perforated themselves—

as the concussion of our manmade capsules

colliding against the blunt trauma of earth continues

for a time less than we imagined,

for longer than we thought possible;

If there is anything to be learned, it is this.

What matters most is that

we love this life we are leaving
and are unafraid of the next.

Read at Federation Square as a part of the Gough Whitlam commemoration on November 5, 2014. 

First published in Magisterium, my second collection of poetry.