Les Murray. B 1938. New South Wales.

This poem is taken from Murray's 1997 collection SUBHUMAN REDNECK POEMS. The collection won the 1997 TS Eliot Prize.

Murray is a poet I come back to because his sensibility is nothing like my own, and he opens the world differently for me,

In a world full of 'ideas' that are wrecking the planet, it's worth remembering the power of art.

LIFE CYCLE OF IDEAS

An idea whistles with your lips,

laughs with your breath.
An idea hungers for your body.

An alert, hot to dissemble and share,
it snatches up cases of its style
from everywhere, to start a face.

An idea is a mouth that sells
as it sucks. It lusts to have
loomed perpetual in the night colours;
an idea is always a social climb.

Whether still braving snorts
ordering its shootings, or at rest
among its own charts of world rule,
amaturing idea will suddenly want

to get smaller than its bearers.

It longs to be a poem:
earthed, accurate, immortal trance,
buck as stirrups were
blare of the panther.

Only art can contain an idea.