This rock poems!
February 15, 2012
For all those occasionally frustrated by the financial aspects of poetry (that is, working your guts out for love alone, just hoping that your poem may reach another person, somewhere) please check out the poetic contribution from mining magnate Gina Rinehart, ‘Australia’s richest woman’, and be consoled that money and art do not walk hand in hand. She donated the rock that the poem is attached to. The rock is a little less shiny than the poem. And a little less clunky. This link is to an often wonderful (and sometimes scurrilous) site called The Worst of Perth, where you can read the poem ‘Our Future’ in all its iron awe, as it appears in situ. Go ahead and enjoy!
But it rhymes, so it must be real poetry…The fact that this was put up in a public place confirms to me that Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are Very Different Places. But as Ms Rinehart points out in her poem:
‘Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government before it is too late.’
Stirring stuff.
prospecting for pentameter
PS Cottier 
Such a good afternoon laugh!! I loved the description of the street as a bad poetry Champs Elysee 🙂 It seems like a rather fitting description.
If I’m in Perth, I’ll know where I’ll be going to pay homage. Although I think that the poem may be swiped from the rock long before any visit from Eastern States me.
I’m encouraged by Gina R’s love of poetry. Now she’s bought a major share in Fairfax, it’s clear that Fairfax papers’ pages will be swept clean of the right-wing rubbish that normally fills them, and replaced with poetry! Highlights will include “The Waste Land” and “Ash Wednesday”, in 2.0 versions rewritten by Ms Rhinehart in her own inimitable style:
“Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Should have worked in a mine instead…”
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Because of the Government’s lack of foresight another day.
If only they’d lowered the scandalous levels of company taxation
and helped build Heaven in our mineral-rich Southern Nation.
(-:
Your poem scanned too well, Tim!