Two Wonderful Poems by Michael J. Leach

 

Melbourne Street Art Septet, Circa 2021

 

i.

disproportionately large grass

-hopper camouflaged

by greenery

 

ii.

fetching feminine face

tattooed

in three shades of blue

 

iii.

monochrome masculine mug

                               graffitied

with red irises and red pupils

 

iv.

one                                                     eno

light                       ♡                        thgil

heart                                                traeh

cradled                                         deldarc

by the limbs                         sbmil eht yb          

of a leafless tree            eert sselfael a fo

frozen in midwinter retniwdim ni nezorf

 

v.

spherical green monster

baring pronounced

teeth

 

vi.

the capital word

‘MELBOURNE’

written on a ribbon

draped round

red roses

 

vii.

bold

words

of realist art

sprayed on a street sign:

viral mutations are real

The Hearts of Matters

 

A golden shovel whereby the final word of each line is from U2’s song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, which appeared on their album ‘War’ (1983)

 

Sunday 15 August 2021

 

Conflicts continue in all manner of fields & trenches.

Peoples the world over have dug

 

down deep to find the titanium will within—

the will to keep going/speaking/hoping that one day our

world’s officials will all recognise     words     spoken from the broken hearts

of the populace and

 

give heart to all the fathers & mothers

give heart to all the children

give heart to all the brothers

give heart to all the sisters

give heart to all those whose lives have been torn

                                                                                                                  apart.

Michael J. Leach (@m_jleach) is an Australian academic and poet. Michael’s poems reside in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Plumwood Mountain, NatureVolve, Cordite, Meniscus, Rabbit, The Blue Nib, the Medical Journal of Australia, the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, and elsewhere. His poetry has been anthologised in One Surviving Poem (In Case of Emergency Press, 2019), No News: 90 Poets Reflect on a Unique BBC Broadcast (Recent Work Press, 2020), Still You: Poems of Illness and Healing (Wolf Ridge Press, 2020), and The 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press, 2021). Michael’s first book is Chronicity (Melbourne Poets Union, 2020). He lives on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country and acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land.