This poem honours a transport worker who was murdered in 2016 when driving a Brisbane City Council bus.
‘Our Countries’
Manmeet Sharma, you came to Australia to get ahead
drove taxis at first, and now this bus.
You’re twenty-nine and handsome. A Sikh bangle silvers your wrist.
You sing love songs at parties. Brisbane’s Indian community loves you.
You have chosen a fiancée. North of Amritsar she waits.
You’ll fly there soon, for the engagement.
The future is bright, yar, as Diwali lights.
It’s Friday morning and you’ve agreed to a fill-in shift
for the 125, Garden City to Fortitude Valley.
You stash your water bottle
wipe down the steering wheel adjust the seat
start the engine
press the button that opens the door.
Passengers nod g’day as they enter
and you swing your bus under the freeway
up the forested hill.
Compared to the hub-bub back home
the streets are so quiet.
Oh for a bus boy to collect the fares
and shout Challo! Challo!
Our Punjabi man
passes the creek where ironbark trees
once shaded the camps of the Jagera people.
A bing lets him know when a passenger wants to stop
they alight with a thankyou driver
or a ta mate, and he smiles back.
The Moorooka shops are ahead.
It’s nine a.m. Eleven on board.
Hush. The sun blessing his adopted city
is yet to anoint the Himalayas.
The sleep of his parents is still-peaceful. Hold them in your hearts.
Hold them.
Manmeet Sharma, you press the button to open the door
and a man pushes in, yelling.
The man is shouting
‘Take me to Central Station!’
(Police will later say he’s known to authorities
has mental health issues.)
‘The 125 doesn’t go there’ you advise politely.
‘Cultural Centre, yar, City Centre—’
In a fury, the stranger throws his backpack at you and lights you up.
You burn, dear man.
Dear man, a Molotov cocktail burns you alive.
Manmeet Sharma, popular and handsome
engaged to be married
loving son, loved brother
you did not survive.
You could not survive. Yet you live on.
Your last minutes on our shared earth
have seared the hearts of both our nations.
Our memory of you is as radiant as sunrise
as everlasting as
our sorrow.
The Rail, Tram and Bus Union will never allow this worker who paid with his life, to be forgotten. Other unions relevant to the collection include Maritime Union of Australia, National Union of Workers, Nurses & Midwives’ Union, Professional Firefighters’ Union, Teachers Union.
Reader comments
‘A wonderful sense of character and humour.’
‘There’s wisdom and compassion within these pages.’
‘‘Vivid, vivacious, intelligent, these distinctively-voiced poems take you from A to Z and back again. A handful of polished stones for your journey.’ Bronwen Levy
“Towards the end of 2017, I combed a beach in Sicily, enchanted by volcanic stones threaded through with quartz as if they were the letters of the alphabet. I began the first draft of the poetic novella Signora Bella’s Grand Tour there, then on return to Australia, an old puzzle fell into place – didn’t my cache of already-published poems fall into the general category of ‘work’, and didn’t they beg to be arranged into a collection of endeavours, from A to Z, like the stones I collected, from Artist to Zoologist?
The history book, Know Their Names, demanded precedence but when I returned to the realm of poetry I was astonished to learn that I was birthing a ‘first’ - apparently no other Australian poet has devoted an entire collection to the subject of ‘work’. The closest anyone came, it seems, is a bunch of Melbourne anarchists and performance poets of the late 1980s & early 1990s who created a magazine that featured poetry ‘for the workers, by the workers, about the workers’ work’. They called it 925, and distributed it for free.
This collection, whose ‘working’ title was originally ‘Alphabet of Work’, is also about ‘workers’ work’ but perhaps takes a broader view. Isn’t the custodianship of a temple over ten centuries ‘work’? Isn’t building and flying a kite ‘work’? Isn’t surviving domestic violence ‘work’? And aren’t we workers all extraordinary in the face of the alienated system of labour we’re expected to conform to; aren’t we all resilient and marvellous?” - Lesley Synge
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~
‘She Is’
She paints herself.
She is walking forward.
She is wearing orange.
Her legs are bare.
Her skin is radiant.
Her hair is up.
She does not hesitate.
Her step is strong.
The rocks before her are huge
but the slabs are steady
the scree is stable.
There’s no hesitation.
The sky is ahead.
