Ernest Hemingway and the Latest Quake By Les Murray

In fact the Earth never stops moving.

Northbound in our millimetric shoving

we heap rainy Papua ahead of us

with tremor and fumarole and shear

but: no life without this under-ruckus.

The armoured shell of Venus doesn’t move.

She is trapped in her static of hell.

Heat of her inner weight feeds enormous

volcanoes in that gold atmosphere

which her steam oceans boil above.

Venus has never known love:

that was a European error.

Heat that would prevent us gets expressed

as continent-tiles being stressed and rifted.

They make Earth the planet for lovers.

If coral edging under icy covers

or, too evolutionary slow

for lifetimes to observe it, a low

coastline faulting up to be a tree-line

blur landscape in rare jolts of travel

that splash collapsing masonry with blood

then frantic thousands pay for us all.

Les Murray is the author of numerous books, including “Subhuman Redneck Poems” and, most recently, “Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse.”