https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/29/les-murray-australian-poet-and-literary-critic-dies-at-the-age-of-80
In honour of the passing of Australia’s big-hearted man.
Bill
Midsummer Ice
Remember how I used
to carry ice in from the road
for the ice chest, half running,
the white rectangle clamped in bare hands
the only utter cold
in all those summer paddocks?
How, swaying, I’d hurry it inside
en bloc and watering, with the butter
and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?
‘Poor Leslie,’ you would say,
‘your hands are cold as charity -‘
You made me take the barrow
but uphill it was heavy.
We’d no tongs, and a bag
would have soaked and bumped, off balance.
I loved to eat the ice,
chip it out with the butcher knife’s grey steel.
It stopped good things rotting
and it had a strange comb at its heart,
a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.
But you don’t remember.
A doorstep of numbed creek water the colour of tears
but you don’t remember.
I will have to die before you remember.
Les Murray
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