The transforming power of light

1.

Who’d come and paint sweet Dora Creek?
Leave out the rubbish
     Scattered by the bin,
And at night, the corner shop’s bright flashing light
     Hot pink and blue.
     A mini homage to
some greater sign –
Kings Cross perhaps? Or Piccadilly?


Plastic chairs and tables don’t quite
Channel Paris despite umbrellas on the pavement.
Customers in thongs and baggy sweats slump slobbily
Over frothy coffee. After three o’clock the louts-in-waiting
Scoff their hot chips and crumple coke cans.

                                                                               Next year,
like their older brothers, will they smash the panes
of the telephone booth and screech wheelies down the street?
Leave out the black marks and shards of glass when you paint
pretty Dora Creek.

Attend instead to the pastel patches—
     Those shimmering smudges which nudge the bank.
Reflection sweetens both tired old shacks
and flash new homes with boats to match.

2.


Lakeside,
         Wangi Workers shines its own bright beacon,
calling to the tired and the bored,
to visitors and long-term locals and those
newly-retired at nearby Wangi Shores.
Roast offerings of lamb and pork and beef
(with chips and veg and gravy ladled over),
cheap Chinese, and monster chicken schnitzel
Are provided.
                         Order and eat under fluorescent glare.
In other rooms, yet more lights attract:
Beer signs beam steadily from the bar,
A band pumps colours in a rhythm different to its sound and
Beyond a part-glass door, the pokies flash their charms.
Outside, the neon glows.
Fractured light ripples past the quiet boats
                                                         To meet the moon.