New Poetry by Robert Verdon

Asylum

sleepless, I peer
through Soviet field glasses 
my father gave me
back in the 
Cold War

the dove dips 
toward the swell that snaps 
across its eyes,
boxes its ear-coverts, 
brittle as bakelite

the dove dips with
my heartbeat, through the
cross-hatched razor wire,
the shredded Southern Cross 
tottering above

a 
sinking ship, 
deck peeled back like a scab,
while thunder wrestles with
the wind’s wet screech

the dove dips and flips,
and falls,
and fights,
and dips and drips like a dislocated tap,
skimming, gasping slowing

early in the morning, I rise in safety,
a waking after an operation, the insomnia gone;
like gongs
gangly girls and boys in gold, and green, call out
on the hard beach below.


- Robert David Verdon 2015


Robert Verdon is a writer in Canberra, Australia, and has a number of publications to his credit.