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Glen Phillips - Gimlet​/​After an australian bushfire

from Sal by Paulo Chagas & World Poetry Club

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lyrics

Gimlet

When I first heard your name
uttered by farmers and clearers
chopping out tracts
of our grandfather’s Western Woodlands
 
I could not fathom
origins of your contorted title
for I thought more of penetrating
steel tools, drilling
 
in the grasp of carpenters.
But then was shown among
blackbutts and casuarinas
your manic twisting green trunks.
 

What tortures twirled these mallees?
Was it suffering salinity
or surviving inland biospheres
here in these arid parts?
 
Perhaps, in youth, you gimlets blindly
followed progress of the blazing sun
circling the sky each day from the east,
your craning necks winding your trunks?
 
Otherwise, like the rest of the trees
you would grow straight and tall
only branching out to provide roots
with a private patch of shade.
 
Gimlet, we stand respectfully to salute
you as a worshipful dervish
of such semi-desert lands,
whirling with this spinning earth!.



(after an Australian bushfire)
 
Smell of burning’s in the air—
xanthorrhoea’s tortured trunks
are like limbs of the immolated;
while mallee saplings are
spent torches, shivering
their black tinfoil leaves.
 
And then the startled crack
of the still-burning heart
of a once-living casuarina.
Third degree charred ground
is scorched hairless of heath,
scarred with white-ash shadows
of what had been. A holocaust ago.
 
And I look at my rough hand
with your fingers delicately folded
in my grasp. Yet won’t we find
re-birth in our lips to grieve
of all this innocence consumed?
                                               
Dampen every ember’s faint
signature to our conflagration’s
past? We shutter behind eyelids
each lingering backward glance
to the fire we let consume us.
And yes, there’s smell of burning
in the air.


Lyrics by Glen Phillips

credits

from Sal, released January 22, 2023
Glen Phillips - spoken word
Paulo Chagas - piano, flute, electronics

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Zpoluras is dedicated to promote and release a diversity of contemporary art products in their most exploratory aspects. This is our truth. This is our aesthetic choice. This is our way of sharing art and culture. It is possible that Zpoluras can contribute to a more free and enjoyable world. ... more

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