Jonathan McKeown
At the Brown Brink
summer's end a seasoned detectorist scanning the beach
Summer will come again heralded by spring, that is the way of things. The moon will wax again, the sun too will continue rising despite the lengthening winter nights. But for each of us the shadow of looming death only ever grows. In a way he is a mirror to me—the elderly gent I meet along the river. There’s a certain pathos about him. Now that daylight savings is ended I often come upon him walking in the darkness before the sky’s first grey lumination begins to throw the horizon of the world into silhouette. I see the glow of his phone in the distance before the company of his music has reached my ears: listening to ‘The Lark Ascending’ or Gibbon’s Rise and Fall, or trying to solve the problems of physics on his lonely rounds. We’ve become … I wouldn’t say friends exactly, but somewhat intimately acquainted. I feel for him: suspect he’s not as brilliant as he wishes he was; that he’s hurt and lonely and unable to admit remorse. But all this is expressed as contempt for others, for the nebulous mass he calls ‘people’—and our stupidity.
waning moon beneath the bridge a spoonbill feeling
About the Author
Jonathan McKeown lives near Cook’s River in Sydney and enjoys the privilege of existing and of being a part of this world. He works as a plumber. He also loves reading a wide range of literature. His poems have been published in leading journals over the past decade and in 2022 his first book of haibun and haiku, Genesis, was published with Red Moon Press.