Inspiration
I enter into conversations with the living and the dead,
with the great and the humble, with the wise and the foolish.
I have these conversations with poets and playwrights,
with novelists and scientists, with writers and farmers and mechanics.
Rarely do I have these conversations with voices,
spoken in my lounge room with intense expressions
on faces seeking ideas, concepts, understanding and truth,
but I sometimes have them in the pub
with faces flushed and words getting slurry.
I have them more often in written words, in emails and messages,
in letters, and sometimes in images in photos and paintings.
But mostly I have them with stories and poems,
with essays and strains from some songs.
In these conversations, I say “yes, I have a story like that”,
or “yes, I agree with you about that”,
or I have to say, “that’s never happened to me”,
or maybe I say, “I think you’re wrong there”.
There are times I say to Seamus,
“that’s a marvellous thing that reminds me of this”,
or to Captain Walt, “yes, I did that too,
but it turned out rather differently for me”,
and he tells me, “you know, we contain the multitudes”.
Robert, here in Australia, told me about his father’s love of the Phantom
and I told him how my father was fond of Tarzan.
Sometimes I ask these people, alive or dead,
what they consider to be important now,
I ask these elders and equals,
“Do I think about this now? Or should it be that?”
I ask them, “do you think I did that right?”
“Do you think I did this wrongly?”
“Did I wreck this promising thing?”
“Can you tell me whether I can fix it?’
Often enough they’re happy to talk to me
through all the things they’ve said and done,
but sometimes they just give me a sullen look
that says “you really have no idea, do you?”
challenging me to get with the program,
do it right, sweat over it, bleed, cry, do something.
In this way, I become the prophet of all things,
the servant of all, in serfdom to none,
the best of them, and the worst, like all of them,
and I write it all down in my poems
while they chastise my fear and cheer my valour,
criticise my foolishness and acknowledge my wisdom,
and help turn the mundane into the magical.
