Savour the day, there is no more important a message
than that. Suck its marrow out, swirl it on your tongue,
the sweetness of the calm, the stillness. Even the dawn
is slowed, it seems. This is the day the spin stops.
These few hours are all you’ll have to find your feet,
to lose your swaying sea legs, so used are we
to constantly being tossed on the heaving blue-tied back
of politics. That morning, let the bitter aroma of Arabica beans
flood your nose, mouth, throat. Anticipate the heat
to come. Water the flowers before you forget
and everything is reset to the blur, dying coral reefs
and hirsute miners in fluro vests digging up bodies,
refugees mired in valuable rock. Men kissing men
and ministers making illicit money (and also kissing men)
and hysteria everywhere, hijabs and halal kangaroos,
child abuse covered up here, here, and here, recurring
beneath so many creeds and colours you can make out
a horrible rainbow, a mirage slick-sheened on oil spills
drowning the ocean. Just water the damn flowers
is what I’m saying, and walk down to the local town hall
or public school, lose yourself in the eruption of languages,
the bright-winged battle of parakeets and magpies above,
and do your best to slip past the pitched tents of war;
anything immovable in this uncertainty is not to be
trusted. Go past the sunny child holding up his parents’
placard—the bliss of his ignorance an incandescence,
unaware his future isn’t girt by sea, but consumed by it—
and there, in the echoing hush, the rustle of paper
and muted coughs, cast your voice into the void. Fate
will do with it what it wills, and as you exit back into
the real world, already beginning to whirl once more,
individual faces merging into a stream of almost-familiarity
and the sound of engines gunning through music, brace
yourself for the hurtling motion of upturned earth, to hear
your future announced in monotone drones on the TV
as you prepare for sleep—brace hard for the impact
of everything changing, and nothing at all.
Click here to read our recent interview with Omar Sakr.
