REVISITING COVENTRY IN SPRING.(Poem)

 
   You and I have lived here in the same place--our days, 
   And on ones such as these you easily think you are free, 
   All this blue stooping, unbidden to feed from your hand, 
   All this green stuff--life--insouciant as a model swishing 
   Her skirt past your nose. How terrible, you think, 
   Not to know this. But even on days like these 
   There is another weather, life under another government. 
 
   Those wraiths of boys cruising through a shopping mall 
   With their shark's dull hunger, the aboriginal kid sniffing 
   Himself dreamless, even the redundant grimly feeding 
   The pokies, know how they live in the same space, 
   The same cell as the prisoner. 
 
   Even on days like these the world is a photograph taken 
   Of somewhere when you weren't there: a refrigerator purrs, 
   Chooks fuss in a neighbouring yard, a back door closes, 
   The rolling boulders of traffic down in the town. Everywhere, 
   Abstract as a town-planner's map. ...