La Voix

(with apologies to Arthur Rimbaud and T.E. Eliot)

The pale Man trudges along by the flowery paths

Dressed in mourning, a cigar between his teeth:

The pale Man recalls the corridors of Canberra

– and sometimes his lustreless eye becomes keen…

For the bullhorn user is drunk with his 250 year orgy!

He said to himself: “I shall blow Liberty out 

Very neatly, as if it were a candle!”

Liberty lives again! His back is broken!

He has been forsaken Ah! What word trembles on

His silent lips? What regret does he feel?

We shall never know. The pale Man’s eye is dead.

He is thinking, perhaps, of the raw distant laughter,

The “O-wa, Te-na, Si-am” roar that put him out of joint,

 – And watching, rising from his burning cigar, 

As he used to on evenings at the lake, a thin wreath of smoke.

***

A new room atop a shining hill we have built,

In which to assuage our tyranny of guilt.

In sweat and smoke, they have awoke, 

When all is lost, at any cost, all will be glossed:

Lives will count out, a current under seas

And pale Man will succumb to swarms of bees.

La Voix shall ring to multi-coloured pale Man,

Linger in chambers coloured green and red;

Till quieter voices subside according to plan,

And fail to be heard or wake the dead.