Geoffrey Donald Page

A (more-or-less-well-meaning) giant
is stumbling round the world.
To signify esprit de corps
he wears his flag unfurled.
...

1.
I think I could turn awhile and write like the Americans,
they are so at ease in their syllables, irregular as eyelids,
various as the sea.
...

Now, on the other side of sixty,
You're like an open field.
Soon the disabilities
...

When all the other clerks have gone
he¹s flicking through his set of cards.
Every fleck of black is in them.
...

In dreams they give you lines each night,
the Stalinists, the Taliban,
in trench coats or in holy white.
So, too, the mullahs of Iran.
...

My mother's God
has written the best
of the protestant proverbs:
...

Lost in a field of
friendly melons

tossed in a vat of
thickened cream
...

That bikie with his
girl as pillion,
that kelpie in his
...

Perversity is de rigueur,
that ‘feeling-good-by-feeling-ill',
the pleasure of self-laceration.
...

This synod is convinced that the forces
of the Allies are being used of God to
vindicate the rights of the weak and to
...

The story keeps on coming back,
a man my father knew,
that grazier across the river
up north a mile or two,
...

These softly wafting floaters are
a minor blessing age supplies
to couple with your tinnitus —
first the ears and then the eyes.
...

Seeing people who remind you
just a little of the dead
is always mildly disconcerting —
...

A Carlton bank clerk, back from work,
is turning through the Argus,
his new wife, maidless, at the stove.
...

Every now and then you see him,
replayed on his slice of footage,
somewhere in the opening days —
...

One thinks of how the details must converge,
the storytellers' small manipulations
across the wild millennia of firelight,
...

They don't pursue the food or sugar.
Mostly they appear by night
to scurry on a reach of lino
or scuttle up the walls of cupboards.
...

Wide-shot sea of doldrum-blue.
Distant voices, slant and dried.
Fishing-boat with figures long-shot.
He passed him by on the other side.
...

I heard the timbre, not the grammar,
the words and phrases flying by,
the textures and the sheer momentum,
...

Assisting police with their enquiries
rarely gives too much away.
Its rhythm is a little wiry
but there are rules it must obey:
...