Parliament Plaza


A Tuesday in Australian
Melbourne,
In sunny early autumn,
it is lunchtime,
And today’s people gather
like scrutineers
Of grass at public statues,
many of them
Children, eating on their
retaining walls
A gallery in a governed street
parliament


As if the antipodes world’s-end
generations
had grown over the old enmities,
longing into
this Australian limpidity - as if
learnt from
its landscape - and fought into
the builtscape
Like any sunrise in a daily
renewal of vision
Lived for this, against all mongering
of peoples.


School children gather, native
fledglings in
The hen-shade of a great
Canary Island palm.
No security guard here but
restraining decency,
No men in camouflage, no Kalashnikov
to be seen,
no evidence of shade-wearing
watchers,
And the warm sky long since
a friend…


As long as the people are on
their guard.


© March 2010 - Wayne David Knoll