– Les Murray
There’s that other great arch eastward, with its hanging highways;
the headlands and horizons of packed suburb, white among bisque-fired; odd smokes rising;
there’s Warrang, the flooded valley, that is now the ship-chained Harbour,
recurrent everywhere, with its azure and its grains;
ramped parks, bricked containers,
verandas successive around walls,
and there’s the central highrise, multi-storey, the twenty-year countdown,
the new city standing on its haze above the city.
Ingots of shear
affluence poles
bomb-drawing grid
of columnar profit
piecrust and scintillant
tunnels in the sky
high window printouts
repeat their lines
repeat their lines
credit conductors
bar graphs on blue
repeat their lines
glass tubes of boom
each trade Polaris
government Agena
fine print insurrected
tall drinks on a a tray
All around them is the old order: brewery brick terrace hospital
horrible workplace; the scale of the tranways era,
the peajacket era, the age of the cliff-repeating woolstores.
South and west lie the treeless suburbs, a mulch of faded flags,
north and partly east, the built-in paradise forest.
View of Sydney, Australia, from Gladesville road bridge
Monday, 2 August 2010