by Glenn McPherson
You’re just like your father,
the fireplace in the dimmest part
of the lounge room being the lifeblood
of your first home. Youth’s incinerators
burn and spit and smoke
like the sole doctor in town no-one spoke
to about cancer as long as he was capable
of performing minor surgery.
A month’s wage to install it on stone –
it made a pinging sound, a tinny
pop like car tyres on the dirt road
across Crown Land to our fishing
spot, not far north of the abattoir
that closed years earlier.
Worth every cent, though the Western-Suburb
Council in the dark’ll never know.
Mid-winter, without lights, AFL
abandoned at half-time unlike Candide,
who went on about the garden. You felt a bit
like one of the patriarchs, ready to pack
it in, but half-suspecting (as true believers do)
a late revival.
When the prospective owner knocked ten
grand from the house price, holding up
a light beam to his eyes
so you could witness the termite damage
it seemed like the right price.
Glenn is an Australian writer whose poetry has been published nationally and internationally in leading journals and anthologies. He has been writing poetry most of his life, considering it to be a part of his daily bread.
The Borough 