POETRY
      Graham Rowlands ... 'John Bannon's Meteorites'

There he was in the depths of winter, recession
& despair, some said. How little they knew.
History doesn't record (it was before History)
whether we're forever indebted to his
first throw of a dice at his Casino or
his first pull on his local pokie but
a man's reach shouldn't exceed his grasp.
It began as the idea of one Great Man
our Founding Father, Premier John Bannon.
Let there be work, said our Founding Father
& work there was - forty new five-star hotels
the MFP site detoxified for a bulk MEGA TAFE
& every electronics engineer in the State
challenged to redesign the Adelaide Oval into
the world's biggest roulette wheel spinning
one meteorite a year from the Museum's
famous collection of Torrens marbles
that wouldn't sell even in a fire sale of
fingers burned, plummeting meteorite values.
For as many years as we'd care to remember
now, each year a meteorite rolls around
the level playing field of the tilted wheel
& stops. Even stopping, it's the secret of
perpetual motion gone political, gone apolitical
now Parliament House has joined the Museum
& always at this time of the month & year
in the five maternity hospitals around the Oval
thousands of carefully planned pregnancies
are Laboring through their contractions
in time with the rolling meteorite
so that, at the moment when it stops,
some deliriously lucky mum can score a
bronze plaque set in North Terrace concrete
just as this year's lucky mum is about to
bear down on John Bannon the 37th.