The Wednesday Poem

Detritus beside Shack’s Holden

Where red brick wall
meets grey sand,
two sprayed weeds
clinging limply to cracks
as if darkness might still
nurture hairy stems,
clusters of domed buttons
yellow-softer seeming
than those of the sunny
cardigan mum wore
fencing off the wild
and its flowers
from the careless
curiosity of us kids.

Laid neatly alongside,
two roll-your-owns,
unsmoked, their papers
as pristine as those
Asians offer their dead.

Westward, through gaps
in mist, ships parked
as if ‘planes on the deck
of an aircraft carrier;
cranes dangling rust-
wreck’t angular bobs,
plumbing Fremantle’s
hazy cityscape.

And all about—
bouncing off walls,
shivering glass—
phlegmy roars of trucks

shunting containers
up James Street hill
to the red-yellow-green
beat of traffic lights,

obliterating, almost,
those sepia memories
Autumn brings sometimes,
the undertow of things
too long left undone.

Peter Burges

* Peter Burges is a retired business manager from Perth, Western Australia. He has had poetry in several literary magazines and poetry websites, including High Window and Westerly. A self-published collection towards slow moving days came out in 2019. He is now working on a collection addressing his experiences in Asia and the Middle-East.

If you’d like to learn more about Peter Burges and his poetry, here’s our 2020 Poets Paddock podcast with Peter