...nature has provided many means for securing
concord...not merely to afford pleasantries...
Erasmus
We've only paddled in the strait;
only strolled by light's diamond-scattered
cabinet of glass, though we've baked
here in luck with mates all holiday.
We've been lulled behind sunnies
by romance on the Honeycomb Coast.
But we'd break the beached ranks if peace
walked like a prince on this water
and overruled a smoking wind.
We'd push in and block the minders;
climb on a friend's shoulder to look
and cup a burst of whoops in our hands.
We'd swamp the TV shows with the news;
damp down Tax Cuts with mean print and swell
Miracle with coloured headlines,
if peace rode up in an armoured tank
on a carpet of shirts, out of dunes,
into Jerusalem and Baghdad.
As it is, peace is the shy achiever
in our house; the mortar sandwiched between
bricks, the pipe that fetches and freights in water.
It is the squat chair underneath our coat;
the switch for light and heat; the bulb wintering
for spring, plumb deep in bedded-down garden.
It is the roots holding the trunk up like a hip;
the footpath jogged on beside stretches of green;
the freeway whizzed down without a second thought.
It is the car cuing the speedster past,
who gives them the finger; the click of amber
and the bridge the level-headed thrum across.
Peace is the teacher who, in the gullet of shells
and gunmen, spirits the teenager to still write
words on yellowed newspaper. It is the neighbour
edging a hole through the wall, to cable
a share of power salvaged from the flotsam
left in the wake of insurgents, wrangling for blood.
Put down the love story. Take off
the glasses. Flick away the sand.
Let's roll and rocket on a breaker.
We'll mingle our shades of salt and warmth
with the swimmers in a strait where west
and east coursing oceans rub and sift.
Let's be fools, pull right out-further,
further-past the lifesaver's buoy; fill up
the lungs; fall in with the strongest
of currents downwelling to stillness
beneath the flush of thinner waters;
clear a passage for them to flow.
If we dare, we could plunge all the way
down towards the current
that drifts from the other hemisphere;
reach to rewrite the records-
nudge a strait of all oceans, lift
to the tug, surge with the fall.
