'Perhaps': published in Undercover of Lightness (page 25), March 2012.
Andrew Burke is an Australian poet who has published eleven books of poetry. He has written on a daily basis - stories, plays, poems and - to feed family - advertising material and videos, annual reports and press releases. From 1990, Burke taught creative writing and allied subjects at universities, TAFE colleges and writing centres. In 2006/07, he and his wife Jeanette travelled to China where they taught at Shanxi Normal University, and, on their return, they taught indigenous children at Wanalirri Catholic School in The Kimberley area of North West Australia. He now dedicates life fulltime to writing.
Other poems from Undercover of Lightness:
Andrew Burke blogs at Hi Spirits
Too much is spoken about illness and medical procedures, too much read into every twitch as sand gathers in the hourglass base.
We sit sipping coffee, mine black for its antioxidant properties, beside young mothers sitting at the next table, prams parked beside their chairs and their babies in their arms, babies wrapped against the autumn breeze in the café courtyard. They are fashionable women, attractive, wearing stylish black and grey, highlighting the white of their breasts as they bare them to feed their babies only weeks old. I am distracted from our talk of travel insurance and such hiccups of aging, distracted not as a young man might be by the beauty of these breasts but by the concept of our lifecycle. Sages are often depicted as old and white-haired with beards flowing down beyond their thorax. Perhaps I know why, perhaps it takes time to ponder things objectively, without the surge of blood, without the wind whistling through wild oats. There’s a lot of ‘perhaps’ in the thinking of an amateur philosopher. I stand and walk back into the café to order another coffee, just to break my thinking, just to get back on track.