“Daylight Cloth,” by Les Murray

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 14, 2011

September morning. White is salient.
The unfocussed wet hover of dawn
has cleared the treetops. In high bush
the ski season packs up, tent by tent,

and the Cherokee rose, its new seams
hitched up rather than pruned
overlaps its live willow easel,
a daylight cloth pelted in white creams.

Minute blossoms of fruit
emerge from lichen’s brown wheeze
that has gathered in their trees.
Burnt-off paddocks have gone out

and the sky is bluer for it.
Beyond the sea coast, rebirthed
4-wheel drives tilt, below,
on the tail ends of big seas.

From Little Star #1

March 2011 brings a new book of perfectly tuned poems by Les Murray, Taller When Prone, and a memoir of his  depression, Killing the Black Dog. Never has the reader seen in such close proximity the messy, humiliating business of living and the lucid, seemingly inevitably forms that somehow spring from it.

Les Murray lives in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of twenty-four books of poetry. He has been honored by the Australian government with the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to literature, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the British Commonwealth.