Heterogeneous

New and Selected Poems

Anthony Anaxagorou

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781999679262
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Heterogeneous is the defnitive anthology of Anthony Anaxagorou s poetry - an extensive and revised selection taken from several previous volumes. The winner of the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award, Anaxagorou offers the reader an insight into his poetry career with work spanning from 2009 to 2016. These seven instructive years highlight the making of a poet who has now subsequently achieved international acclaim as a thinker, writer, polemicist and activist.

From
A Difficult
Place To
Be Human

2013

Football Results

As a boy my father took silence over talk,

he would sit deep inside his glasses

as if admiring their stillness

as I stayed picking myself out

from inside a draft.

Cigarette smoke made curtains

over Saturday afternoon’s football results,

his thin fingers rummaging

through that tawny beard

as if searching

for the good luck he’d lost

to the abrupt knock of his journey.

Absently

he would walk me to wherever,

our footsteps chipping away at the grey silence

as if the irritating wind

and then playful rain

marred those beloved glasses of his.

I can still hear those football results

I can still hear those Saturday afternoons

when I held his hand just to listen to him curse

the childish season that only wished to be felt.

My Father’s Walk

I shake your hand now

our fingers match

we hug

with men between us

speaking concisely

on politics

your silence

still breaking the bones of my points

with eyes too similar to ever meet.

Soon, your hurtling rage foods forward

to drown the water I drink

hurling us back

with our conversation half spelt

inside the same torn kitchen

I raised my first words in

when your face reminded me

of a fatherless little boy

and your thinning footsteps

were all I had to look up to.

Broken Shells

The truth is a single eg

wishing quietly for a voice

somewhere from within the womb of its time

it waits to be born,

to sing up into the ages as a folk song

that people will recall and say

“yes I know this, I remember this,”

but music is a harmony between silence and love

and courage is the only act which can unlock freedom

opening a new growth, an unfettered gala of true spring

reaching out across classrooms and newspaper sheets

and the auto-cue of straight-eyed anchormen

as every enemy infected by hate

stops to watch the sun

buy back the sky with all its gold!

Yes friends the truth is a single eg

complete as the last word placed at the end of the longest poem

it’s there, as a mother is, as a mountain is,

and from its permanence it watches us only to weep

us who fight, who thrust our wickedness into the core of days,

us who invent death, destroying the fleece of our world

so we can build dust on top of dust, superfluous graves hanging,

forgotten cemeteries that lean into unrest and the truth

buried beneath it all.

In the resplendent colours of a dream

it clings onto the imagination for life

pulling against the scrawl of some midnight scholar

who writes maniacally I won’t forget you,

you didn’t happen just to die.

So the truth becomes a dream

swimming within the cognisance

of scholarship and poetry

wandering as an orphan amidst the blur of the true

and the untrue

the opposition vs. the motion

the information against the misinformation

because the truth is a single eg

and a lie is a million sperm

racing to undo it

beating against its weathered shell

with ego, deceit and corruption

until it can no longer withstand the onslaught

and a lie eventually permeates the truth.

A young boy came and sat beside me

on an old bench where I was writing this.

Peering over into my notebook he said,

“your handwriting is similar to mine.”

“Really? Well I’m writing a poem about the truth” I said

he laughed like good luck with that

“I would help you but I don’t know much about the truth.”

“Well that’s a lie” I said, “here, finish it.”

“You serious?”

“Sure.”

“OK.”

When I come home and my mum says she missed me

o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Dedication
• New Poems
• From Jumping Off Feathers
• From It Will Come To You
• From A Difficult Place To Be Human
• From A Sad Dance
• From Returning Stranger
• From Let This Be The Call
• From Te Lost Definition Of Hope
• From Card Not Accepted
• Acknowledgements: