Tuesday 17 May 2011

Tuesday Poem: "Strange Peace"



The wet nightmorning.
Lights of empty shops
faking impregnable security.
Occasional passing car
shiftworkers or
hidden dawn missions
going Godknowswhere in the
hissswish of tyres on
the black dappled road.
This sudden trigger swinging
open a memory door
long shut falling
like a shaft of light in the
cathedral of 4 a.m. St Kilda
open 24 hours to the
prayers of vice.
In my tram conductor uniform
a brown incongruity moving past a
flashing backdrop of sleaze
Fitzroy Street acrawl with junkies
whores and winos
cockroaches scuttling in the cruel chill of the
nether time.
That strange peace between night and day
before polite society comes out to play.

The poet wishes to acknowledge The Press in whose pages this poem first appeared.

While wandering around the interweb one day, I stumbled upon a make-your-own-movie-from-text website (what can't they do with technology these days?). Not long after, I was intrigued by one of Mary McCallum's poems where she had set it to an animation created through this same website, xtranormal. If the reader wishes to see an animation of the poem above (albeit a clumsy one) go to the link below:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/12040038/strange-peace


1 comment:

  1. I love the facade, and the scuttling to change - as if there are two different cities - night and day.

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