RHAPSODY IN A CHINESE GRAVEYARD

 

All the bright boys turned to dull men

in my time. I watched them, turning

into things they were not once but might

have been. Time did not change; I saw

this coming, how we changed from shades

we were, to shadows of ourselves,

and nothing changed. My elegies to nothing

came, and shadows of the clouds passed

over everything, the bright girls,

the young men: I watch petals fall.

 

Michael Sharkey © 1998

PO Box 513 Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia

- from The Way It Is: Selected Poems, 1984

(Darling Downs Institute Press, Toowoomba, Qld)

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