Sense of a Century

  1913 
  
  Your father four, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams 
  analysed into English, a suffragette beams 
  at a camera from a broken window in Holloway   
  after her sisters have tried to blow it up, US 
  
  Customs asks if you’re an anarchist, polygamist,  
  idiot, the Paris audience riots on the opening 
  night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Berlin crowds 
  clap on three monarch cousins of England, Prussia, 
  
  Russia, whose beards wag a third of the world, the 
  bordellos’ tight tango pulses through Buenos Aires 
  in sync with the sly sterling of London Banks while 
  Villa & Zapata ride peasant rage into Mexico City 
  
  & The Economist opines the spread of capital & 
  beneficent boots of empire make war impossible. 
  
  
  1963
  
  Fourteen & neither here nor there. 
  Books begin to open an escape hatch. 
  Just down the hill from high school 
  Parramatta Road’s telos is fulfilled 
  
  & LA enters as a drive-in milk bar 
  while Ramsey Road gets a supermarket 
  where you can buy without talking. 
  You prefer I Want to Hold Your Hand 
  
  to She Loves You. Neither is true. 
  No girls at school, or anywhere else. 
  Dominus vocat, servus advenit, non 
  je n’ai pas la plume de ma tante. 
  
  No TV, you don’t see dogs & fire-hoses 
  in Alabama, nor King having a dream.
  
  
  2013 
  
  Carbon passes 400, mother dies & reality 
  TV plans to send two keen people to Mars 
  in five years, forever. Early adopters go gaga 
  over Google Glass, eyes leaving their eyes 
  
  & planet for an algorithm. As Typhoon Haiyan 
  smacks the Filipino poor, the first lab-grown 
  meat is eaten on YouTube. The first child is born 
  from an IVF batch whose genomes his so-called 
  
  parents screened for what they consider ab-
  normalities, mice are shown to be connate 
  with a smell encountered by their grandparents 
  & Snowden leaks our total Stasi State. Mother 
  
  dies, we get a map of first mama universe’s 
  relic light & new data confirm God is a particle.