Midnight’s boxer He has become
That the ghosts from the ‘tents’ of long-ago pay homage
Memories that fill a boarding-house room,
Busted knuckles soothed endlessly with goanna oil
And on the soul, scars that can’t!

Stories in his eyes:
I could have been an Olympian?!
But try and extract the malice from his fists;
He wouldn’t know how to sink in the ‘boot’,
A tender honour picked-up off the battlefields of assimilation,

Midnight’s boxer He has become
Fifty-seven-year-old gas tank that can’t see empty
Blackened skin like blackened memory
And hard, plain hard!
The unrecognized pillar of his mob,

And after midnight has gone, way gone,
And his time is over
Will he be missed and his triumphs mentioned?
Midnight’s boxer he has become . . .

© 1999, Samuel Wagan Watson
From: Of muse, meandering and midnight…
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, St Lucia QLD, 1999
ISBN: 978 0 7022 1742