Posterity is the Invention that Surpasses

or (Cold War of the Fallen Tombs)

“Unlike these tombs, which were real ones containing the bodies of the dead, all the other funeral mounds which are to be seen at Plataea were, so far as my information goes, erected merely for show: they are empty, and were put up to impress posterity by the various states who were ashamed of having taken no part in the battle. There is one tomb there, bearing the name of the Aeginetan interests which I am told was constructed at their request ten years after the battle, by Cleades, the son of Atodicus…”
Herodotus of Halicarnassus in ‘The Histories’ c. 300 BC


1.

I am Cleades, the son of Atodicus
the Australian
who made a pile at Gallipoli
- or was it further down the peninsula?
those foreign places are all Greek to me.
Who cares if it was ten years or a hundred after?
but, a tumulus, a road, a barrow, a great big mound
was needed for public recognition, as they say.
Posterity is the invention that surpasses
- at least at present.

Our Victorian Mornington Peninsula might do
- for a small retainer,
it’s circumstance is splendid. It looks
like Gallipoli from both the sea and air,
and there, a reconstructed re-enactment
of pomp and ceremony
can take place. And, on the Westernport side,
on flatter lands at Hastings, or Tooradin,
we can have Plataea, Boeotia,
some rural theme park.

2.

I am Albert Edward Henderson,
my scribe’s first cousin twice removed,
born Mildura 1898, absconded from law
school where I was sent to finishing
in Sydney, to be a number in the first A.I.F.
- aka Albert Edwards -
against first parent knowledge;
draining through Suez in a mob
shipped like schoolboys on the free excursion,
then steaming up the blue-skied Aegean
as if that was a sight under darkness,
going ashore to this Thracian hollow
where my eighteen-year old legal bones still
fool with consequentiality without a trace.

I have my whited cross! Seeing my mother,
unhorsed from her equestrian champions,
fey, mad with grief, my Mayor-father
lettering his failure to find my bones
cutting writ in the granite stone
of new public parks, a crux
of clanking flagpoles by duck-ponds
of river Murray pump-water!
as if my prospects deserted there
to keep annually appearing in a Mallee-Park air
with the pungent rosemary in herbal
conventions of quack respect.


3.

I am my scribe’s grandfather,
Horace James Jackel, who refused
my name to Billy Hughes P.M. when
he came slapping the sword of his army
for our crowd to encore.

I did not register. I did not enlist.
I was not conscripted. I did not go.
I went instead to public shame, to white
feathers, to prison and its shaming afterlife
in a curtailed ordained ministry.

A gospel conscience was my commander,
and then, I could not countenance killing my
distant unknown un-Australian-German cousins.
I learnt the other meaning of active service.

I had sixty eight years labour
for the kingdom of peace I believed in,
primary producer of Spirit wisdom,
of wide brimmed shelter,
in open home and family.

And, I still have this cheek
turned out to you for shame
from where my bones lie
collapsed in Nangana Cemetery,
in the ignominy of heroic reticence.

4.

I am Posterity: judge me not, judge me;
as our Australian War Memorials,
rising years after the battles,
like development project tombs in new Boeotia,
which, by clubbing to the memory
of the crowd-joiners, are rebuilt
as in honour grandly…


to catch both those ongoing views
- in the daily sacrifice of pilgrims
- entering the compromise
of that public selling -
at the crossroads, and also,
the rising path of the sun, with
a masonry of traps and snares,
as the endangered spirit creature
is turned to profit bred and tamed.


11 November 2005 © Wayne David Knoll