far off police sirens are ringing 
on the third day back at home: 
proof of a life lived in analogue--

       i’d made out these ruins 
       from an aerial view
       & they seemed 
       either a sculpture or a tomb

              it takes a short afternoon
              to drown with you in decades of 
              superstitious junk—those ancestors
              once seemed so gigantic,
              each one a gothic ceiling

                     but the arc of your eye sets the limits--
                     we’ll just try to keep dust
                     out of our meals, & off the path
                     toward a conversation 

                            let the clocks unite the world as they will: 
                            our atonement is probably 
                            a job for tomorrow
Barnaby Smith is a poet, critic, journalist and musician living on Darug and Gundungurra land in New South Wales, Australia. Recent work has appeared in journals or anthologies such as Stand, Blackbox Manifold, 3AM, Best Australian Poems, Tentacular and Ranger, as well as Cordite, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Poetry Anthology, and more. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.