Alex Skovron - If Words Could Speak

Alex Skovron is the Melbourne-based author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella. His most recent book of poetry, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. The Attic, a bilingual selection of his poetry translated into French, was published in 2013; Water Music, a volume of Chinese translations, appeared in 2017; and his novella The Poet (2005) and collection of stories The Man who Took to his Bed (2017) have been translated into Czech. A new volume of poems, Letters from the Periphery, is due in 2021.

If Words Could Speak

after Sarah Rice

If words could speak, why would they speak their selves when they could deputize a billion counterparts to voice whatever needed to be said? If words could sing, more nimbly than they do, would they still need to be encased in lexicographers’ brocade while every tinted letter hummed along? If words could dance, no alphabet we know could entertain them to remain in place but rather would they overleap the leaves of print to learn unlettered flight? If words could drown, would they subside only to soundings where language swirls, then re-emerge revitalized newclad and dripping bright with intimations of an unworded kingdom innocent of thought and yet replete with mind? If words could then aspire to everness and watch their colours and their meanings flash across the epochs as along a line, why should we think so poorly of the world that every word we speak draws us away from every truth that every word would speak?

Behind the Scoreboard

‘Rumour, the swiftest of all evils that are.’ (Aeneid, Book IV)

When rumour breached the gates of the municipality nobody dreamed what was about to follow At first there was just the occasional silly mishap since accidents after all are bound to occur but soon a distinct pattern began to emerge as one disaster took hold after another The local gymnasium had its windows smashed an antique church was reduced to a pile of cinders the synagogue was bombed and offensive posters materialized on every second corner denouncing this or that established luminary (all of them admired for their ethics and integrity) over his or her affairs or misdemeanours with innocent minors of whatever sex or sundry secret embezzlements or profiteering Then somebody got wind of something outrageous the mayor was said to have uttered a decade back and it wasn’t long before a few enthusiasts had assembled behind the scoreboard at the oval and armed with slogans sticks shovels the odd stone set off for the business end of town

Inverted sunset, photograph by Mark Ulyseas.