First Things RSS Feed - Les Murray https://www.firstthings.com/author/les-murray en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:15 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/les-murray 60 ​The Invention of Pigs https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/02/the-invention-of-pigs https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/02/the-invention-of-pigs Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500 Come our one great bushfire
pigs, sty-released, declined to quit
their pavements of gravel and shit.
Other beasts ran headlong, whipping

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]]> Boarding in Town for School https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/11/boarding-in-town-for-school https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/11/boarding-in-town-for-school Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0400 The trick was to be
asleep before the rail signalman
whispered in with his latest
girl off the midnight train

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]]> The Genghis Firmament https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/the-genghis-firmament https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/the-genghis-firmament Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0400 Suspended archery of night
keeps a resplendent distance
slowly circling the Earth.

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]]> Jesus Was A Healer https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/03/jesus-was-a-healer https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/03/jesus-was-a-healer Sun, 01 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500 Jesus was a healer
never turned a patient down

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]]> Growth https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/06/growth https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/06/growth Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 One who’d been my friendly Gran
was now mostly barred from me,
accomplishing her hard death
on that strange farm miles away.

My mother was nursing her
so we couldn’t be at home.
Dad had to stay out there, milking,
appearing sometimes, with his people,
all waiting for the past.

Hiding from the grief
this day, I dropped off a verandah
and started walking

barefoot through the paddocks
until the gravel road
gave me my home direction.

Cool dust of evening,
dark moved in from the road edges
and the sky trees, penciling
across the pale ahead.

Bare house lights slowly passed
far out beside me.
No car lights. No petrol.
It was the peak of war

but no one had taught me fear
of ghosts or burnout streaks
from the stars above my walking.

Canter, though, gathered behind
and came level. The rider
pulled me aloft by the wrist
Now where are you off —

Back where a priest had just been
cursed out of the morning room,
I was hugged and laughed over
for the miles I’d covered.

Years later, it would come down
to me that Grannie’s death had
been hidden away, as cancer

still was then, a guilt in women.
One man was punched for asking
Did Emily have a growth?

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]]> The Plastic Eater https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/05/the-plastic-eater https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/05/the-plastic-eater Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400 Back to the hospital again,
on the meals list, on the drip,
in for yet another stay
over an artificial knee
put in to replace a
born bone sideways wobbler.

Nurtured by mother cow
I have no idea how
a clunky knee can stop
your breath in pure pain,
unstring you as with a nerve-chop,
millions have jumped at prostheses:

a week, and they hip-hop
delightedly. Even you had six
weeks’ cure, before return of agony.
Since then will have cost us a year.
Just after you were born
Europe and her limestone cities

swirled with last-breath calcium
blasted into the air
yet you tell of chewing plaster
out of your nursery wall
and how at your
first refugee-child Christmas

you ignored the candled sweets
and gnawed the pine tree’s base
of calcareous brittle.
No wonder I became a teacher!
But after five children, I’m
Perhaps chalk just down so far.

I, butter boy, sipper of vinegar,
am amazed as ever how you,
dear pardoner, kindest wife,
always blame yourself
as now, beyond hospital staph
and the overworking knife.

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]]> The Glory and Decline of Bread https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/the-glory-and-decline-of-bread https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/11/the-glory-and-decline-of-bread Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400 Sliced bread (sic)
a centimeter thick
staling on forty surfaces
fit for soggy sandwiches
real bread excels all this

high top, Vienna, cob
baguettes three times daily
breads poignant as a sob
Jewish rye and German
brothers from the hob

Tall grass waving gluten
foreshadowed cultivation
its unbloody skin-oil scent
displaced the hunting tent
for prayer and work in season”

Rice eaters do not yet disdain
all meals centering on one grain
but potatoes came, and pasta
and boi meat from old Masta
and bread put butter on the heart

the idle svelte would dine apart
once designer chefs had risen
bread turns to landfill on the shelf
or, like salt, gets smuggled in
to sit below itself.

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]]> The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/the-death-of-isaac-nathan https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/the-death-of-isaac-nathan Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500 Stone statues of ancient waves
tongue like dingoes on shore
in time with wave-glitter on the harbor
but the shake-a-leg chants of the Eora

are rarely heard there any more
and the white man who drew their nasals
as footprints on five-lined paper
lies flat away up Pitt Street,lies askew on gravel Pitt Street.

Jumping off startled horses come men
and other men down off the horse-tram
which ladies stay aboard and cram

their knuckles in their teeth, because a
grandson of the last king of Poland
is lying behind the rear wheels,
lying in his blood and his music sheetswhere he missed his step and fell
to be Sydney tramways’ first victim.
Byron’s Hebrew melodist, driven
out of London by Lord Melbourne,

by the inked horns of Lord Melbourne,
is now being lifted tenderly,
he, the Anglican who used
to pray wrapped in a white shawl

is being wrapped in a tarpaulin
and carried in catch-up cadence
with crotchets he might have scored,
carried over streets to his residence

to lie in state on his table:
Our Father and Melech ha-olam,
then to go in a bourdon to Newtown
and sleep near the real Miss Haversham.

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]]> The Canonization https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-canonization https://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-canonization Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 Rome 17 October 2010

Mary MacKillop, born 1842,
what are the clergy giving you
on my birthday, Mother Mary?

Sainthood? So long after God did?
Independence? But you’re your own Scot.
The job of Australian icon?

Well yes. Black flies in the buggy.
Bush pianos. The cheek-sawing wimple
in summer: you did do local penance.

Your vow to “educate poor children””
might you now say “to heal
the education of poor children”?

Who says a woman can’t rise
in the Church? Mother Mary,
awake in Heaven, pray for us.

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]]> Knotwork Medallion https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/06/knotwork-medallion https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/06/knotwork-medallion Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400 What did you see in the walnut?
Horses all harnessed criss-cross
And a soldier wearing the credits
Of his movie like medal ribbons.
An egg there building a buttery
Held itself aloft in its hands—
The horse-straps then pulled the nut shut.

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