DAMEN O’BRIEN Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning poet based in Brisbane. Damen’s prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize. He has been published in journals all over the world, including New Ohio Review, Poetry Wales, Mississippi Review and Overland. Damen’s first book of poetry, Animals With Human Voices, is available through Recent Work Press. He is currently working on his next book.
The Longest Wave No phone call from you with the news we were expecting, so this Christmas will be the same gathering of children aging away from the wonder of those first yawning mornings. I’m laying down a line of dead letters at the beach: black tiles clicking into place with awful finality under the sun’s dazzle: poems like so many failed children queuing in some figurative waiting room for life. The white space burns like ivory in the indirect glare of the beach, like bone. The swimmers clear from the wave as if they were fussy seagulls stepping away from the edge of the foam and now we can see the bright swirl of clothing that cleared them out, a small form lolling in the longest wave. All day I’ve been faced with endings and beginnings but I can only seem to find the endings in this poem. We lean forward too avidly, while the waves pull their lips back from the beach’s pebbly teeth. I was thinking at the operatic distances of Wagner, of the birth of universes and their ending, how some physicists think they are the same; how the longest wave comes all the way back around the seas of forever, how ripples begun on Queensland’s shores from the splashing of a child find their way across an ocean to twitch the other coastline, however small, however slow. Here, in this part of the universe, someone wades out to inspect the material, calling out to say that it’s only floating swimmers billowing like a mischievous Houdini or a prankster’s flag, so this poem has too hopeful an ending, but this is the first day of the holidays and there are many days yet to survive.
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