Michael J. Leach


Back to the Sea


                                                                                    The Australian
                                                                  summer burns out as we march into
                                                  autumnal climes. Landlocked here in Central Victoria,
                                           I take a short walk around a shallow reservoir. I then pack my
                                       deep blue jeep for a road trip to Torquay to catch one final stream
                                of curvaceous, salty waves direct from Bass Strait. When I finally arrive
                           oceanside, I pull up and sigh at the sight                    of those oceanic waves
                      rhythmically rippling, rising, rolling, and                         ramming into wet sand.
                The roiling of that water as it’s sucked back                              out to sea calls to me
              with the most melodious urgency. I speedily                                  get out of my deep
           blue jeep with a foamy surfboard made to ride                                                  waves.
        Clad from neck to ankle in neoprene, I sprint bare
    -foot through baked sand to the sound, sight, and scent
  of salt water rhythmically rippling, rising, rolling, ramming,
 and roiling. My senses urge my legs to move ever onward—back
to the only place where nature can elevate me from the monotony of life.



 
Modern Words


These words materialise
en masse from all manner
of mouths & media.

The public lexicon
contracts & expands
rhythmically,

changing with #culturaltrends,
with advances in
science

& 
tech
-nology.
Word clouds
of set sizes & shapes                    
form amidst the greenhouse
gases of our polluted atmosphere.

Our future is                               			skywritten
—written not in those                                                 					constellations 
                                                                                                                                of distant, glittering suns

but in our own                               		atmosphere,
in those shifting                               		cloudscapes
and our own                                                             					SUN.

Meteorology is the modern, evidence-based astrology.

How could the words be misread 
by so many for so long?

Maybe this has little to do with literacy 
yet a great deal to do with the fact 

that, as our globe warmed,

the American Dialect Society’s
Word of the Year 
changed marginally
from ‘truthiness’ in 2005 
to ‘fake news’ in 2017.

That 2016
Oxford Word of the Year
—‘post-truth’—
rings true

like an alarm bell
some are deaf to.




Michael J. Leach is a poet, epidemiologist, and statistician who works as a Senior Lecturer at the 
Monash University School of Rural Health in Bendigo, Victoria. His poems have appeared in Cordite, 
Rabbit, Meniscus, Plumwood Mountain, the Medical Journal of Australia, Medical Humanities, 
Consilience, the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, and elsewhere. Michael’s debut poetry collection 
is the chapbook Chronicity (Melbourne Poets Union, 2020).
 
 

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