lines written upon remembering the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, after a long illness
Tell me again how you came to be here,

ringed by burning rains

alone, brown-coat zombies

pummelling Long Plain

in ranked surges of union jacks.

Where’s your ticket for jostling

so the structural steel decks –

the belle dame raises her chin –

ecstatic that the sea has hemmed you

in? We are ready to sing.
Beneath the scalpel-thin cross

hairs searching hearts’ pipe-

work for dissenting iodine, hiss

her indrawn breath and gape

for the first bellowed syllables.

The blue and the white, by flooded stairs

must face the elders on this night

of capes and tights; of jaws.

She salutes, her flame sets

down to foaming applause.