Hilsea Lines

by Pauline Hawkesworth

Ramparts on the throat
of this city - a tender-tight thread
separating Portsea Island
from spreading suburbia.

Through this neck
creek and moat compete
for cormorant, shank, egret
and a pair of kingfishers.
A tin-foil sky attempts to keep
the city at absolute body temperature;
but people unwind here,
and find someone other than themselves.

Some boil over -
a fractitious sky loosens the young men
who erupt as though they have tasted
brackish water of creek and moat,

On the narrow footpath
on top of Victorian ramparts -
built to keep us from the French
a young man has hanged himself.

The circumstances known only
to the ranger who found him,
and his mother and father, but
the tree is festooned with flowers.