Australian
Poetry Journal

Issues / Volume 5 Issue 1 , July 2015

Poem

Copyright

Ross Donlon

  For Enda Coyle-Greene
  
  
          Xanadu, Inisfree, Elsinor 
                  are gone for poets ever more. 
                          Prufrock can leave and eat his peach. 
  
          Ice box plums can’t be re-stolen 
                  in a common red wheelbarrow 
                          then tipped on Dover Beach. 
  
          Paradise is as lost as the Inferno. 
                  Brooklyn Bridge is sold, as is love 
                          when blushed then applied to a rose. 
  
          The ball turret gunner will stay at peace.  
                  He will not be demeaned in death   
                          like that again. The State can rest.     
  
          For that dread shape with Shakespeare’s    
                  head and poetry’s insatiable maw         
                          is consuming last metaphors 
  
          as it slouches toward Coole.    
                  It makes swans fly then honk at us below, 
                          ‘Whose woods these are I think I know.’