The cat steps over your sleepy head,
trailing the neat and dirty toe-prints
of his night's carousing across your pillow
then stops to wash himself just beyond reproach
just close enough to be dozily admired.
The sun chins up to the window sill
and the visitor bristles with pleasure.
But I don't want to wake up yet
because there it sounds again, the ship's horn.
It eludes me if I listen closely
so I decide to stay asleep, and wait,
knowing that beyond the red-brick roofs
an impossibly white liner lies in Sydney harbour.
She's double-ended, has rakish smoke-stacks
at both bows, an anchor seaward
and an anchor for the quay.
Her enormous engines turn and turn;
and craggy old North Head and sister South
reflect and amplify a sound so fundamental
that whole suburbs built of brick and tile
over sheltering, pillowed heads are shaken
in their dreams.
There are passengers and flags at both ends:
people leaning forward, peering down at foam.
Their hair, their clothes and the flags at either bow
are all streaming aft – wherever that may be.
Letting off steam, the vessel's got a blast
and lung-capacity like the diva herself, Dame Joan.
"Coming or going?" she asks; "Coming or going?"
The air quivers over the colony of Sydney.
Those who are homeless often have no-one
with whom to remember things.
I remember, now: how the child stood
on a juddering deck in a distant harbour
while the streamers tautened
and your little face shone
to see the way the flat-topped mountain sat;
and how the streamer, snapping, flicked
like the tail of the very first car.