Tuesday Poem - The Hard Shards of Class by Peter Lach-Newinsky

The Hard Shards of Class

Devising figments to temper his nothingness.

-          Samuel Beckett, ‘Company’

So much, he thinks, felling & furrowing,

blasting & wiring into the hard body

of this land till we forced out its food.

Now we’re fat as slugs or locust plagues

in a rainy spring, as the train speeds on

to Cootamundra. Why do the folks

milling on the platform fill him

with sudden sadness, taught awareness

of his lazy paunch? Maybe it’s just

the Beckett on his lap, the train lunch,

dun poverty, hardness of faces used

to yakka, biff & debt as he is not

cosy & looking out of smeary glass

like a class voyeur into hardiplank

yards filled with rusting cans & cars

flagpoles, a boat far from navigable

rivers or liberating sea. The train

creeps past. Trapped in bodies, history,

class & always some infernal glass

between himself, them, him, a mirror

refracting hard shards of inside out.

Next stop: Harden.

I got to launch Peter Lach-Newinksy's new book Requiem (Picaro Press) at Collected Works in Melbourne last week. And I chose to read this poem because I have travelled many times on the train to Melbourne from the Southern Highlands where Peter still lives, and between Yass Junction and Cootamundra is the station called Harden. My mind has played with that name many times. I also like the station called The Rock. You know it is coming up when you look out of the window and see the bloody big rock.