John Kinsella

GLASSTOWN PEACE ACCORD

I had toy soldiers, and toy
tanks, planes, battleships.
Strategy game terrain.

Hedgerows. Sand drifts.
Camouflage. Correlations
to battles fought & lost

were real enough outcomes
changeable. Local factors.
Temporal dynamics.

But the wars stopped
as I got more aggressive.
And then the war

in myself stopped.
I hear a gunshot
and it breaks down

the code of my works
& days. I spend a lot
of time systematically

walking the block
studying scats
without touching

them. Just to know
what has been,
what might be.

Sometimes I see
bloody feathers,
bones. I am less

of a wanderer
than I was, watching
over home.

JOHN KINSELLA is a Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University in Western Australia. His most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016) and Insomnia (W.W. Norton, 2020). His new memoir is Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020) and in 2021 Manchester University Press published the final volume of his poetics trilogy, Beyond Ambiguity: Tracing Sites of Literary Activism.