You have been a marker

in my landscape of discovery

about poetry and about

the deepest crevices filled with life.

 

You rhythmically sang in words,

sending me your angular thoughts

about what it means to live

in this land that I lazily call home.

 

You called out to me in echoes fresh,

to me who glibly views with an ordinary lens;

and you asked me to look beyond the

limiting horizon of my lesser self and see the

profound and the troubled,

the small and the large,

the beauty and the ugliness,

in the landscape of this sacred place.

 

Live on you must,

live on you will,

for you have brought

to me what few have ever brought:

to see with a poet’s eyes,

and to feel with a human’s heart.

 

For Les Murray

 

1/5/2019