Dear Graeme
I must compliment you on the poems you posted. One of the first poets of any
renown
to write about the snakes of Western Australia was John Boyle O'Reilly, one of
the Irish Fenians
transported from Dartmouth prison to WA in the late 1860s. He later achieved
fame in the USA
as an Irish patriot and organised the escape of other Fenians from Perth. He
used 'dukite' for
'dugite' but the poem is quite interesting, though I prefer yours on the basis
of personal
experience. Your other poem has some adventurous syntactic and imagic leaps.
Glen Phillips
Graeme Miles wrote:
> Hello All
>
> My bio is rather brief at this stage : live in Perth, WA; did a degree in
> English at Edith Cowan University then Greek and Latin at University of WA.
> My personal poetics are still a bit too nebulous and in-process for
> definitive statement, so I'll just post a couple of short poems instead.
>
> Two Dugites
>
> Two dugites beside the path
> call two quick steps
> from my body's memory,
> the dance-steps of the unscathed
> monkeys. And I wonder if the snake-handler's motto
> is not "They shall take up serpents", but memento
> mori. All this year
> I watched a snake melt into the ground
> from flesh to sandpaper and fish-bones, and thought
> I had become accustomed to this dying down.
> And yet, two coiled dugites
> burrow a hole of coldness through the afternoon.
>
> The Body's Poem
>
> I read the body's poem in different ways.
> Thinking from the centre of the chest, I
> peered up through a swan-like, periscopic neck.
> While thinking from the belly and the crutch
> became an old drunk or a cat. The head
> just steered. Or else I became a fountain
> and a spray of thoughts purled where my head had been.
> I was the nervous system's code, the blips
> of electric syntax. I saw myself
> as Krishna's clothes on loan and a multitude.
>
> Graeme Miles
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