SAINT SYDNEY For David Fogarty St Leonards station quite near Sydney Central sends a Jew on an errand for the eternal. A bag to deliver food tied firmly behind, she steadies her feet, balancing to find, what her wandering eyes shortly meet, the daily salvation of an Australian street. Her cycle is rusting but her pedalling's divine. Abraham, make a hasid's destination thine. The rain drives me to destiny and a bus. The skies like famished guests descend on us between the ordered feast and the wind-swept dusk. Ages recede to speed in the rising dust. Marist College boys smile. The eternal's outside but seats blossom into girls inside. There's nothing to see but the repentance of trees bowing in hurried homage to me. The cyclist's gone some other way in the epiphany of a single day. Sometimes a short journey's enough to turn transience to a kind of love lurking in a Jewish bicycle, a Christian school bag and the final words of a Muslim on a bus passing the sufi jaywalker in all of us. * a member of Jewish sect in Palestine in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC
Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1
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