Meditation on Parliament House, Canberra
Among the free world's lesser bastions
it would be easy to miss this minor
bunker under the rammed earth, the sheepish
grass, where the descendants of Macarthur's
Spanish/South African mindless ovines
cringe still, waiting for the fleecing, the dip
and drench, the indignity of the dogs
yapping and yarding, the orders to jump,
if it were not for the sheet of flag, flat
against a sky too torpid even to
galvanise irony, a standard that
proclaims: "It is night in the motherland;
the stars are out against the deep blue;
they surround the flag that comforts, blankets.
Sleep and dream of super japes in Iraq."
And the sheep toss only lightly, aware
that the Bush is vastly empty, a void
of inanity more terrifying
even than their own inbred Merino
aristocratic blankness, pure and white.
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