Les Murray
Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake
Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake
In fact the Earth never stops moving.
Northbound in our millimetric shoving
we heap rainy Papua ahead of us
with tremor and fumarole and shear
but: no life without this under-ruckus.
The armoured shell of Venus doesn’t move.
She is trapped in her static of hell.
The heat of her inner weight feeds enormous
volcanoes in that gold atmosphere
which her steam oceans boil above.
Venus has never known love:
that was a European error.
Heat that would prevent us gets expressed
as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted.
These make Earth the planet for lovers.
If coral edging under icy covers
or, too evolutionary slow
for human histories to observe it, a low
coastline faulting up to be a tree-line
blur landscape in rare jolts of travel
that squash collapsing masonry with blood
then frantic thousands pay for all of us.
