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Matt Simpson

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A Hasty Rejoinder

I'm not recolonising, Mrs M, nor here
to put my words into your - nor
into the Island's - mouth,

nor to feel comfortable. I've seen
what's left of Port Arthur, have heard
the guide's hard hellhole narratives

enough to make me feel
the sometime emptiness of love
and hatreds used to compensate.

Out in the blue harbour
the Isle of the Dead is always going to send
its ghostly stench inland.

I'm obliged of course to underwrite
the wonders of the place;
it's expected and it's right:

cliffs, crags, different-coloured birds,
landscape that's familiar-but-not-quite,
that makes me feel I've Star-Trek'd here,

will suddenly come to
in a staring seminar in Liverpool, babbling
of blue remembered hills and settlements

right out of Shane. In a one-horse store
a woman said 'Everywhere you look's
a view.' But views are history too.

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