Ron Wilkins - A Matter of Life and Death

A matter of life and death

While walking down the street
I surprised a girl and a boy
in passionate embrace against a wall.
Nothing strange about that, you may say,
but she was dressed in school uniform
and it was during school hours.
Ah, that’s life I said to myself.
Hey, guess what I saw in The Boulevard
I said to my wife.

Next day I was carrying
a ring-tailed possum by the tail
as I walked along the road.
Schoolgirl heads
swivelled in unison as I passed.
Burying the possum
in an unmarked grave next to the last
and beside the graves of my two cats,
creating quite a cemetery,
I thought to myself, that’s death.
Hey, guess what I saw down the street
I suppose a schoolgirl said to her mum,
completing yet another
life and death tale.

Ron Wilkins
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/4/worm

Sorting - Benjamin Dodds

Sorting

Stainless-steel pincers prick and tear
at a spread of gelatinous film
as I tack across the magnified world
of circular Pyrex dish.
Resting my eyes back in 1:1 scale,
I find that this membrane
is the anaemic skin
of a tiny speckled frog
made transparent
through weeks
of refrigerated storage
in hermetic cube-stacked jars,
its silken bounds
the only thing
that kept free-floating workings in.
Previously anchored to their task,
strange forms now range adrift
in the sterile expanse of ethyl alcohol,
a wash of organelles
breathed out by the slackening shape.

Benjamin Dodds
http://benjamindodds.blogspot.com/