'From Australia to Africa and Alaska Manfred Jurgensen is an indefatigable traveller, vividly recording the places and people he encounters, and through it all retaining a consistent poetic identity, engaging, refreshing and unique.'
Michael Wilding
Midnight Sun,
Songs
and Sonnets,
Five Islands Press,
Wollongong 1999
tumor (1)
punctuation mark
code.
learning to read
braille. black cells. the dark
envy of our
breed.
pale moon at
midday.
night sun's afterglow.
letters in x-ray.
the language we
grow.
death shining. blind
date.
pulse-beating heart's fear.
perhaps she is late?
or won't she
come near?
sockeye salmon
a fatal birth. freshwater
turning red.
the urgency to die. memory trace
reclaimed in mortal heed. a
spawning bed
in natal stream to terminate the race.
survival, as ever,
against the flow.
leaps above the rapids, the air-daring
dance of no
return. fleshy shoots that glow
in ecstasy. time of the last
pairing.
currents that bear the
life that it once bore.
nests in lakeshore gravels. the final
deed.
ocean's tidal call. to have been before,
to be and be again. this is
the breed.