Poetry Parnassus is a project of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, hosted at the Southbank Centre in London. It ran from June 26 to July 1, featuring 145 poets from around the world. Here is the Guardian’s interactive map, where you can click on a country and read its poem. I will be posting them on a semi-regular basis until they’re done.
The Ambassadors, by John Kinsella (Australia)
In cold weather we are as large
as our clothes make us, warding
off failure with diplomatic immunity,
exploring limits of the plenipotent.We describe for our hosts the place
we come from: it’s large and many
weathers threaten its coastlines. Inland
is an entirety inside an entirety,an infinitum. An island, yet it is endless.
Yes, there is a great heat that underlies
all extremes. Yes, we retain red dust
under our fingernails years afterarriving in the Great City. Our
tastes are not lavish – we will acquire
books and tickets to the theatre,
and sack galleries for their spiritualworth, but keep social standing
out of discussions. We will visit Saint Paul’s
and wonder over Donne’s sermons,
but no hint of Apostolic Nuncioswill haunt our office. We will offer
up raw materials, generations
of the well-fed. We will admire
the Old Country’s astrologersgazing up through smog,
bringing heaven uncomfortably
close to earth. Back home, our
skies are so wide and so shining…we remind our hosts at moments
of triumph – ‘Water Music’
on the Royal Barge, the Sex Pistols’
performance of ‘God Save the Queen’ –our skies are so wide and so shining.
The embassy ends before it’s begun
and yet is never complete – the skull
we bring with us shines through canvas,our skin, and as we ascend the stairway
to hand in our resignation, the skull
comes into focus – so wide, so shining,
so willing to trade across harrowed oceans.
• ‘The Ambassadors’ from Armour (Picador, 2011) by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd
This poem takes off from Holbein’s 1533 painting of The Ambassadors, with Australian tourists doing the Old Country. They are confident in their young nationhood:
Inland
is an entirety inside an entirety,
an infinitum. An island, yet it is endless.
And they will acquire
books and tickets to the theatre,
and sack galleries for their spiritual
worth, but keep social standing
out of discussions.
Yet there’s a touch of cultural cringe in reminding their hosts at their “moments of triumph” that “our skies are so wide and so shining.”
Ultimately, though, we all have to deal with the mortality of people and nations, and the poem lands back in the painting, where
the skull
we bring with us shines through canvas,
our skin.
Here’s the painting for reference.
