Australian
Poetry Journal

Issues / Volume 5 Issue 2 , November 2015

Poem

In my Incunabula

Kit Kelen

  TV was eternity. 
  There was always the promise of snow. 
  
  Fingers ribbon black with fiddling, 
  type and leading shaky. 
  Some characters filled in, 
  keys stuck. 
  
  I never had a golfball 
  or anything selectric. 
  
  I was scribe of the old school,     
  still scribble to this day. 
  
  Kettle and fan for company. 
  No silent night—  
  my fridge was rocket ship in kitchen then. 
  Never quite took off. 
  
  A record would jump then 
  sometimes it wouldn’t stop.  
  Into the early hours like that. 
  Even then were things 
  you couldn’t quite switch off. 
  
  And on the screen for company 
  blue loungeroom bathing of the former age. 
  No true colour we could call. 
  Ceiling and floor shrunk. 
  We stared into the light 
  
  of alien transmission. 
  The vertical, 
  the horizontal—  
  our whole world all in thrall 
  to a simple dying star.