This poetical rumination reflects my own ambivalence, as an immigrant to Australia almost half a century ago, towards my Australian existence. Is one's life largely the result of mere serendipity or is it, at least partially, malleable in our own hands?

 

Atlantic Elegy

 

Shall I reject a life lead so far

from home? Or lament the existential negligence

of fifty years I did not have, at home,

where I could have been?

 

It seems I am the murderer of what I should have seen,

of fulgent self-promises redeemed.

 

Fifty years is a short time to live

but so long in the living.

How can one, lifting a glass to a new morning,

not remember that night always follows day;

that one can fight to stay, growing ever younger

in an ancient, a foreign place,

or go smiling into the arms of yesterday?

 

These questions are pure rhetoric, of course:

we cannot erase lives either mundane or fulfilled,

nor maintain fastnesses, nursing wounds stitched together

with a cheap procedure of the frontal lobe.

Nor would wish to.

 

My spies tell me that Australia and England

are nicely “similar”. I'll take “familiar” but, truthfully,

I would be content with an Ashes Test

at Lords, on a slightly rainy day.

 

Christopher Hubbard

Cornwall, England

2016