Les Murray

Photographing Aspirations

Photographing Aspirations - meaning Summary

Youngness, Accident and Image

The poem presents a terse, unsettling scene of a motorcycle crash and its aftermath. It contrasts shiny, transient spectacle with lasting bodily damage, following a young rider whose injuries are exposed and then mediated by cameras and requests to suppress humiliating images. The language links mechanical excess and human vulnerability, suggesting how media, shame, and physical consequence shape what remains visible after violence.

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Fume-glossed, unbearably shrill, this car is dilated with a glaze that will vanish before standstill— and here's the youth swimming in space above his whiplash motorcycle: quadriplegia shows him its propped face— after, he begged video scenes not display his soaking jeans, urine that leathers would have hidden and the drag cars have engines on their engines.

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