all the posts the mailman never sent ...
With the sun in our faces and the wind in our hair we set out long ago into a boundless world full of hope and possibility. Now as the dusk creeps in and the sun prepares to set, we trust there is time to set it all down in words ...
... or are we destined to be commuters on the treadmill of school-work-retirement village?
Image: 1946 New York subway by a 17-year old Stanley Kubrick
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
- by Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poet and academic, killed along with his family by the Israelis, December 6, 2023
Today is your wedding
Mango and cherry
Ripe with
the taste of jubilee.
I'm happy, we're happy,
of course you're happy too…
The photo above is fake in the literal sense. But it contains a truth, brilliantly conceived by artist and Instagramer Brailliant - his work here. Albert and Marilyn probably never actually met, although her friend Shelly Winters relayed that Marilyn held him as a fantasy partner and there are various rumours and even jokes about a liasion.
Albert was a socialist at heart, a German Jew who fled the Nazis and spoke openly against injustice everywhere. He opposed Leninism and what he saw as the tyranny of the Bolsheviks. The passage below is excerpted from Why Socialism, published in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review. Read more
Fitzroy is a fascinating suburb, one of the oldest sections of the whiteman's Melbourne. We lived there all through the seventies and then taught at Fitzroy High School thirty years later. The photo above is of firemen relaxing after extinguishing a blaze in the milk bar opposite the school.
Below are some images of the F19 protests and barricades, late 1977 as the F19 Freeway was being pushed through ...
Those things make me nervous
but not for the reasons you think,
for the full article by Philip Harvey, go to Eureka Street - the poem was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 18th of June 1966.
Not the 1871 Commune, not Paris 1968 or Belfast in 1969 ... but suburban Fitzroy in 1977
Anna hides in a shoebox somewhere, prancing in a photograph through flooded streets beneath a bright Chinese umbrella. I dig out all the albums and folders looking for the actual print, to no avail - but the real image is always in my mind. Never lost or missing, I still see her clearly even though half a century has slipped past.
Alexandra Parade Fitzroy, late 70s, inner city Naarm. Melbourne they called it then.
Although recently published, these posts have been written over many years. They note various thoughts coming to mind as we wander through this once-beautiful world ...
