Posting of poetry has been infrequent over the holiday season. Belatedly, here is a poem by Ern Malley (Liverpool, UK 1918/03/14 — 1943/07/23 Sydney, Australia), a modernist Australian poet, whose poetry is none the worse for the poet never having existed.
Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters —
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
the black swan of trespass on alien waters.
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