James Walton #34 Last Seen Alive, at Canakkale

How simple in the end: to smell the vinegar of an infant’s head

this blink: how different to the beginning,

when the whole world collapses to a baby’s cry.

Know the pomegranate cheated with hibiscus flowers,

and siren ficifolia recruited by marooned stars

falling in an aureole of shell bursts

(the blue mosque unseen, the famous river past the cliché of artists,

but we couldn’t elude the haunt of gum leaves

languidly revolving in their own smell.

I wanted to be the fat magpie lolloping in the greed of water,

while silver eyes so jealously wait their turn)

Crusader’s foolish pose of vigil down on Dardanelles steps

sighted by Hellespont drowning, this slow ebb of nationality

is more than alien imperial tales adjudicating the division of souls.

Sand absorbs the running of memory those ripple lines of being,

lapping anthems to the billeting stanza

(so near that silly point my fingertips could touch you my enemy

our embarking coronas entwined like lovers,

now that we understand all the secrets

who ever thought of the stop over pyramids

and these trenches in such willing stupidity)

There is space in my sigh for us all.

Too scarce now to want to be visible,

sear my heart into the banksia - my old nose the wasted cone

that stubs the unwary toe.

Our sun had always wanted me a familiar smudge in any landscape,

captured in stained glass federation

the cuckoo shrike shatters the gargoyles,

breaches all callistemon flying buttresses

(I know your name, I know your name).