Responses 46.
Peter Boyle
A small child watches his hands probe
the miracle of shadows, how ghost-things
shift across the floor as multiplying
coins of sun press gently down
from the flickering window.
The air twitches with spring’s irritated wind,
the garden still glistens with last night’s downpour.
No one sees the same world twice.
No one chooses to celebrate
light playing on the narrow wall that guards
the passage to emptiness.
Voices lift towards a room
slowly filling with sunlight,
the sudden shout of crows
while a boy bounces a ball in a courtyard.
In the unquiet of unexpected beginnings
arrival and departure are hands pressed
on the glass of the same door.
At every moment is what you carry inside you
a thousand times larger than you?
And is where space ends
called death or infinity? *
* Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, XLV <translated by William O'Daly> p. 45
PETER BOYLE is an Australian poet and translator of poetry from Spanish and French. He has published eleven books of poetry, including the award-winning collection Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness (Vagabond, 2019). His most recent collection is Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions (Vagabond, 2024). Peter lives in Sydney.
