Two poems by Poet, Murray Alfredson

Young bones

Those were still the days when gas was made from coal
leaving a residue of coke, pure and porous
carbon that burnt ashless. The gas was deadly, though,
not merely thinned with air to blow out walls when touched
by careless spark or flame, but toxic through the lungs
and blood to brain.

                                     I do not know just why Anne took
the coal-gas route; history honours, archivist,
but years long punctuated with psychotic bouts
chlorpromazine, that mind-divorcing drug, did not
quite hold at bay. Did her heavy future stretch
too far its terrors? This much I know, that schizophrenics
rarely make old bones.

-- Mindfields: edited by Jude Aquilina & Ken Vincent. Port Adelaide, S. Aust. : Ginninderra Press, 2011

Falco berigora(on the Strzelecki Peaks)

It was no gale
but plumb amidst
the roaring forties
and at seven
hundred metres
on that island
where all the trees
leaned strongly eastwards
the wind bit chill
through summer cottons.

To lunch and talk
we lay on naked
granite, in shelter
of melaleucas
tough and fully
ankle high,
forcing their roots
in narrow cracks
through meagre rock-
crumble and leaf-rot —
when from the east
a bird swooped up,
brown falcon poised,
wings wind-fluttered
scarce two metres
above the peak.

A moment she hung
against the wind,
then turned and in
her turning drew
her wings closer
and stooped down
the northern drop.

We ran scarce twenty
paces to the edge.

That black streak
flattened her flight,
swept out above
the plain beside
the flecked sea-crawl.

-- Ocean, v. 6, 21 (Winter, 2009) ;Visible breath; ed. by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling. Stoney Stanton, Leics: Indigo Dreams Publications, 2010.