poetry | Geoff Page

2001

We will decide
Who comes to this country –
And the circumstances
In which they come.

How like a piece of poetry it was,
the roughening iambics,
those sharpened ‘c’s’, like angled pikes,

the two-beat lines that got us going –
except line 3 which had its extra
fist banged on the table.

Note the subtle half-rhyme, too,
‘country’ matched with ‘come’
and how the preposition ‘in’

assumes its proper place.
Like most great poetry, of course,
it’s mainly made from echoes:

the glorious Three Hundred Greeks
who held Thermopylae
and Winston Churchill roaring still

“We shall fight them on the beaches . . .”
Like all such deathless works of art
it’s shivering with myth:

the golden hordes who spoiled our sleep
across two centuries,
the bard far back with lyre and smoke

declaiming his alliterations,
the ancient battles of his race
with dragons, gods and men.

No wonder, then, that those who might
have shown us something else,
defeated now by poetry,

had nowhere left to turn.

Overland 181–summer 2005, p.92

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