The Death of Isaac Nathan, 1864

Stone statues of ancient waves

tongue like dingoes on shore

in time with wave-glitter on the harbor

but the shake-a-leg chants of the Eora

are rarely heard there any more

and the white man who drew their nasals

as footprints on five-lined paper

lies flat away up Pitt Street,lies askew on gravel Pitt Street.

Jumping off startled horses come men

and other men down off the horse-tram

which ladies stay aboard and cram

their knuckles in their teeth, because a

grandson of the last king of Poland

is lying behind the rear wheels,

lying in his blood and his music sheets where he missed his step and fell

to be Sydney tramways’ first victim.

Byron’s Hebrew melodist, driven

out of London by Lord Melbourne,

by the inked horns of Lord Melbourne,

is now being lifted tenderly,

he, the Anglican who used

to pray wrapped in a white shawl

is being wrapped in a tarpaulin

and carried in catch-up cadence

with crotchets he might have scored,

carried over streets to his residence

to lie in state on his table:

Our Father and Melech ha-olam,

then to go in a bourdon to Newtown

and sleep near the real Miss Haversham.

--- Les Murray, January 2012