Morteza

Coming January 2022

Morteza, a young physician, makes his escape from a country like Iraq, finds asylum in one like Australia. Each year he travels to his native land to treat the victims of terrorist explosions. meanwhile, his new country turns fearful, mean-spirited, eager to shut its doors. On the armature of this story Neil Creighton weaves a work at once epic and lyric. A gifted poet with something urgent to say possesses a powerful voice, especially when his indignation is disciplined and his imagination fired by empathy. Morteza offers memorable and vividly particular imagery; yet no reader will fail to feel its universality.

—Robert Wexelblatt, author of Hsi-Wei Tales

I woke this morning

I woke this morning

to music of breath and skin,
dark cascade of pillowed hair,

a jacaranda-blue day
dancing through the curtains

and kookaburras exultant
celebration of day.

First published in One Sentence Poems May 19

Elegy for Ikeogu Oke

Always the relentless tide comes in.
Sometimes it snatches a child.
Sometimes an adolescent is held in its suck.
Sometimes it takes the infirm 
waiting silently on the beach in hope of release.
Always it sucks back, carrying them out
into the vast, dark wasteland,
a region beyond the sight of the living
who play in the sun in the knowledge 
that one day a wave will roll in for them.

Sometimes it comes for one such as you, 
someone in the prime of life,
someone garlanded with deserved honours,
someone with a wife and young children,
someone with a mind clear and deep 
and crackling with ideas
and in whom adversity and courage 
had forged a character bold, truthful 
and uncompromisingly upright.

Then our tears must flow.
Our hearts must mourn.
In our spirit we groan and sigh.
We wear the heavy mantle grief.
We stand and gaze out to sea.
But we cannot seek there forever.
The living will return to life,
to joy, to celebration, to love, 
to songs celebrating our brief moments 
in the wonder of the world.

In my song of living I will make praise for you. 
I will celebrate that I have known you.
I will rejoice in your life. 
I will rejoice in The Heresaid, 
your masterwork that for years
you honed and polished into perfection
with no knowledge of the honours it would bring.
I will rejoice that our minds met
and our friendship flourished.

You have gone and yet you still are with us.
You have not drifted anonymously away.
You have touched hearts. 
You will touch hearts yet to be born.
Your legacy is not just your work.
You have left a reminder of what 
we flawed humans can be.
I want to take your diligence, your honesty,
your uncompromising adherence 
to the search for truth,
your generosity,
your belief in justice and equity,
your love of creative endeavour 
and your ceaseless search for its perfection,
yes, take them and desire that they live in me
as a continual reminder of you,
you, who it was my privilege to know, 
you, who I celebrate,
you, who I praise,
you, whose name I say,
Ikeogu Oke,
great poet,
clear thinker, 
wonderful man,
dear friend,
now gone 
too young.

At The Victoria and Albert Museum

Two little girls, both about four,
play in the courtyard’s shallow pond.
The day is warm. They run and splash
in unselfconscious delight.
I have seen such abandonment before 
in a great violinist playing Beethoven’s concerto.
I have watched as she was lifted 
and then carried away
on the tide of the orchestra.
I saw her surrender to the music,
as if she was a mere instrument
and the orchestra a single entity
chosen for that moment 
to transmit wrought transcendence 
in all its complex, shifting moods.

The concerto I hear this day is different.
As I watch and listen
I am moved by this question:
in all the marbled stillness inside the museum,
all the carefully re-created rooms,
all the beautiful costumes
from eras long since gone
and all the exquisitely designed rugs
hanging quietly on walls,
is that any greater beauty 
than this which I observe
in these two little virtuosos 
improvising on their single theme
in a way that requires no rehearsal,
only the abandonment found
in the very young or in great artists,
whilst an orchestra of blue sky, water,
sunlit grass, light on skin and hair,
splash of colour and ripple of laughter
plays in beauty-saturated accompaniment?

First published in Anti-Heroin Chic, may 19

Blue Mountains Grotto

-for Paul and Sue Armstrong.
We leave the high panorama and descend steeply
past smooth-barked angopheras patterned in pink and grey. 
At the bottom a narrow grotto is embraced 
on three sides by curving sandstone cliffs.
We walk under a low overhang. 
A waterfall, drought-reduced, silvers past 
and ends with musical splash in a clear sandy pool.
Ranks of fern and moss step up the steepness.
Tall coachwoods climb to light in column straightness.
A little creek exits the pool down a rock-filled gully
and where the cliff face ends a single slanting beam 
splashes a patch of startling brilliance 
into the grotto’s deep green shade.

First published in Verse-Virtual July 19