Famous Reporter # 8 - poetry, Graham Rowlands: 'John Bannon's Meteorites'

GRAHAM ROWLANDS

John Bannon's Meteorites

There he was in the depths of winter, recession

& despair, some said. How little they knew.

History doesn't record (it was before History)

whether we're forever indebted to his

first throw of a dice at his Casino or

his first pull on his local pokie but

a man's reach shouldn't exceed his grasp.

It began as the idea of one Great Man

our Founding Father, Premier John Bannon.

Let there be work, said our Founding Father

& work there was - forty new five-star hotels

the MFP site detoxified for a bulk MEGA TAFE

& every electronics engineer in the State

challenged to redesign the Adelaide Oval into

the world's biggest roulette wheel spinning

one meteorite a year from the Museum's

famous collection of Torrens marbles

that wouldn't sell even in a fire sale of

fingers burned, plummeting meteorite values.

For as many years as we'd care to remember

now, each year a meteorite rolls around

the level playing field of the tilted wheel

& stops. Even stopping, it's the secret of

perpetual motion gone political, gone apolitical

now Parliament House has joined the Museum

& always at this time of the month & year

in the five maternity hospitals around the Oval

thousands of carefully planned pregnancies

are Laboring through their contractions

in time with the rolling meteorite

so that, at the moment when it stops,

some deliriously lucky mum can score a

bronze plaque set in North Terrace concrete

just as this year's lucky mum is about to

bear down on John Bannon the 37th.

Graham Rowlands is widely published in national magazines and newspapers. He is a long-time poetry reviewer for Overland.