Tug Dumbly # 30 - Found Poem, Cooma [For James Walton]

Found Poem, Cooma

How sweet to find a poem in the footpath

that doesn’t start and end with Shalee Sux

or Wazza Wuz Ere!

But there it was, etched with a conviction

to outweather decades:

SHANE ROCKS THE WORLD

AND ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS

CAN REST UPON THE KNEE OF JESUS

Enigmatic, evocative,

demanding to be puzzled at.

Who was the Shane who so boldly carved this rune

in the concrete of a Cooma Street?

A modern Marvell?

One who, having spent his rhetorical stock

failing to coax from his mistress her chastity,

was now washing his hands of the whole flock

saving themselves for the Savior’s knee?

That knee. That’s what got me.

Not in the Lord’s arms or bosom

will all the pretty girls be blessed,

but rest upon the knee of Jesus.

A cracked world joined in a small word stressed!

                          *

It had been a bleak day Shane –    

six-hour drive from Sydney, hungover

and hunted by murderous semis, clocking

the monotonous mounds of roadkill

I was trying not to become.

I checked in, the lone guest of a Bates motel

and took a walk through the Alpine dusk,

armed with a bottle of rough red in defence

against the cold and my own company

sought the church where my mother grew,

maybe searching for something of myself

in the melancholy proximity 

to my flesh’s distant past.

I found no trace of the minister’s daughter,

but did find your poem, Shane,

a little wonder in my path.

I studied the words in the dying light,

trying to riddle out the narrative of you,

the pretty girls and Jesus,

but at best could only second-guess.

Yet you lent me a spark. 

In years to come your blazon will remain,

testament to a man of fire and heart.

Decades down, others may stop and wonder,

ponder your puzzle with conjecture and rumour:

who was this Shane who rocked the world,

enigmatic street scribe of Cooma?