I
I find my past in another man’s poem,
where the forgotten dead are named.
It was in the days of uniforms, pressed trousers,
blue shirt ironed, tie with a regimental stripe
boys in one line, girls in another, prefects,
like us, in a disordered gaggle to the side.
It had not become a naming of the dead
in the bright sunny afternoon, three bells summoned
we were told of someone missing, gone to the
shop for lollies, sailing to where there might be
dragons at the edge of the known world,
the road leading down the hill to the city,
a place where we’d often gazed, a place
beyond the blue haze of eucalypts.
A runaway perhaps, the Odysseus of Kurri Kurri,
The policeman said he was a good boy and Anticlea was worried.
II
This was, perhaps, the first of the many dead
that were to come to us over the years in a country town
leaving us now as old men, the sons of the absent, adrift
from home, on a beach somewhere foreign, gazing out to sea,
trying to find a lost horizon. The scars on our beggars’ feet
have not healed, just grown fainter, harder from the
roads we have walked down, our numbers thinning over
time – not everybody will come home from the war.
I read the name of the dead boy and remembered
the name of his killer and how he too was a boy I knew
In teenaged heydays, salad days on the farm on
Avery’s Lane before the grey days ended adolescence
in a pile of mangled steel, glass and plastic beside
some highway, late at night, a name on a morning
radio bulletin, casualties of childhood, the end of the beginning,
the beginning, perhaps of the end.
The naming of the dead.