Aidan Coleman’s poems have appeared in Glasgow Review of Books, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review among others. His first two collections of poetry, Avenues & Runways and Asymmetry, both published by Brandl & Schlesinger, were shortlisted for national book awards in Australia, and his third book of poems, Mount Sumptuous, was published by Wakefield Press in 2020.
BARBARIAN STUDIES
Weather in which I might be
elsewhere, lounging
book in hand, Tim Tams
(dark, perhaps), tea a given,
instead of the uphill pram push of swaying kids,
singing drunkenly:
what a coachman circa 1840
or his horse felt, probably,
or the wind millennia before,
roughly
when the Vikings (for all their
poetry) at least did their
own rowing –
unlikely as they are to pop up
nowadays
in ads for fathers
with proportional custody;
although they’d do well in this park
where dogs – in loose
and scratchy orbits – nosey about
the margins of
the gated playground
and kids jostle, shove, and swing
like wrecking balls,
like ambassadors
whose sending we regret.
The park is full of aggro dads.
I, poet, am one.
(First published in Australian Book Review, August 2015)
