But then, not all “sonnets” are great either! Lots of people still laugh at Cubism for example, and there is a lot of “bad” examples of it, but “habituation” and “training” changes all that, and admittedly has now turned it into a frozen icy pole, which is another problem, but as John von Neumann of Los Alamos fame once said, “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to it.” Ditto poetry.

The inevitable morning, for example. Winter’s stars fi-nally trapped in droplets, their globular prisons beaded at bladepoint on knives of grass, a horrid boogie.

The man walks down the fluorescent-lit corridor to his death. He thinks of his father, telling him what distinguished strength from weakness; his mother, absent behind an ethanol cloud; the congealed mass of his trauma pulling him like a lodestone through his life.

How could I claim to love my home and not recognise this military zone as part of it? The checkpoint is part of this homeland! All this time I had known a different Palestine. How could I have not known this piece of land, this occupied checkpoint, as a part of my geographical sense of Palestine? It was a porous map, in which an expanding hole denied me the right to know it, wholly.

As Gaza burns and the world’s cameras turn elsewhere, I find myself returning to the many Edward Saids: scholar, critic, dissident, even a kind of spiritual figure who bore witness with uncommon clarity to the heartbreak of displacement, and who insisted that thought itself must answer to conscience.

The act of doomscrolling a teeming amount of virtual content is widely familiar in the actual internet tube of dreams of 2025, yet poems have always been literature’s doomscrolls.

Thirty years on, as we watch Body Melt (1993), the schlock horror classic directed by Philip Brophy, we are struck by the technical proficiency of the practical special effects, its nihilistic send-up of Australian archetypes but perhaps, most of all, by its vision of suburbia, the site in which this grotesque “splatstick” plays out.

I contacted a healer recommended by a friend, in a period that I feared that a μάτιασμα* was on me. Over email and only half believing, I gave him my longitude and latitude and he went to work. He told me I had lost a soul fragment. I returned to a moment of having my small blue underwear lifted away from my body.

In the Afterword to the published version of her Edward W Said Lecture at Columbia University given in late September 2023, Isabella Hammad asks what would Said say about the current crisis in Gaza. Although her lecture was given just before the October events, the Afterword — specifically penned to address the ensuing Israeli genocide — reads like an extended footnote to her lecture, exploring the gravity of Said’s work for an understanding of Israel’s decades-long occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonisation of Palestine.

We had expected to use this space to publish an article which would have demonstrated that an Australian Prime Minister, the then Mr Robert Menzies, over-ruled the recommendations of his government’s safety committee and authorized the British authorities to explode their nuclear bombs at Maralinga.

Anyone studying the Australian poetry of our time will be struck by a significant fact: the anti-war ranks in the community have enlisted some of our finest poets, but the pro-war elements are poetically silent. Is this because those who, even with the best of patriotic motives, welcomed, supported and justified Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war know at heart that they have stiffed something in their conscience? A poet who has maimed his own humanity becomes mute.

Artistic and creative activity has never been restricted to the middle and upper classes. Australian working class voices have been present since invasion. A long list includes the protest verse of convicts, ballads of migrant women’s working life, lyrics of popular songs from Jimmy Barnes or Archie Roach, the deeply political poetry of Aboriginal poets, performance poetry and spoken word in urban pubs, stories of hardship on the land in the bush tradition, prison poetry, union songs, hip hop rhymes, and page poetry dealing with working class experience.

I don’t remember my old man, I was much too young, but Mum told me about him one night when she was down in her cups and drinking wine. He was her second husband. (Her first husband and my half-brother died in 1930 — something of measles.)

Let the recent events in Gaza stand as a reminder that even after seventy-six years, the Palestinian people are still here. We share our stories like the olive tree holding firm to its roots. We remember our villages’ names long after they are wiped clean from your maps. Our joy, sadness, and fury paint an image that cannot be erased. This is what it means to be Palestinian; we are here, we tell our stories, and as long as that is true, there is hope.