Lines to a young lawyer
At twenty and with no real financial prospectives
Or substantial achievements, it would be absurd
Of me to offer you a laundry list of life lessons
But take these two pieces:
– buy a two family house in a majority Spanish neighbourhood
– tell him you love him
To Hugo at Bathtime
Take the bar of soap she offers
At its rounded ends
And run your fingernail across
To peel off a silver, like a bitten fingernail
Or a silver crescent moon
Hold it up to the window one bathtime soon
To block out the moon,
Leaving the sky immense and empty
Apart from your soap-silver moon
Which you must surround with the suds-studded sounds
Of splashing and smacked tummies
In a jovial hullabaloo
Hold it up one bathtime soon to block out the moon,
So it can clean
Your fingertips, the moon, and all things in between.
400
Now in my dreams, there are
Two separate square gardens,
With two separate gates which
Do no lock and so are always
Slightly ajar, and two separate
Pairs of hundred-eyed peacocks,
Four in all, with four-hundred eyes,
And two separate wooden benches
With individual dedications to the
Same professor of mathematics
Whose name I don’t recognise,
And two separate strings of rain-
Soaked lilac vines dripping separately
Onto two separate now wet casements
So that we could sit
In the same place but alone
To ourselves to have this conversation,
Maybe over the phone?
Yes, and no have to deal with
Saying so and so.
“Leave you, to go the road we all must go.
The road I would choose,
If only I could, is the other” Lady Murasaki
Wrote that. Things must have been grim.
Secret Messages in the Key of G
A girl sitting in my lecture is so
Perfect. I would ask her to marry me,
But what hope is there at all for someone
Whose reputation as a horse thief
Is not so much well-proven as widespread
Throughout coastal Australia and most
Metropolitan centres of France &
Norway.
Words and art by Harry Peter Sanderson.
These poems first appeared in print volume 88 edition 3 SOAP.