Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
The Despots of Epirus, poems by Isi Unikowski.
The Despots of Epirus
Like missing-person posters at the local mall,
the faces of the last rulers of the Despotate of Epirus
look out from their keeps in tapestries and icons
with enough detail to be plausible; but,
as I squander an hour or so by tapping on links
for ‘predecessors’, or ‘fathers’,
and lineages stumble backwards over history’s uneven pavement—
arrival of a greater power from somewhere else,
or the matrilineal line cracks
with treachery over supine scions—
their faces take on the physiognomy of doubt itself,
vulnerable to time’s rucked weather; a muddy coin
waiting to be dislodged by a plough;
mosaics tiled in cloud and snow; a fresco
in a ruined abbey, that’s half profile, half stain,
reminding me how I used to procrastinate, making
photocopies of photocopies of photocopies
in the library basement: the very last one always
precarious, like something almost appearing
in rain’s cold, dented pewter.
The Prime Minister listens to
the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
We saw him once: ushered into the back room at the record store,
where it was known he’d make his choices among the late Romantics.
He sailed serenely past us while we paused, a little awestruck, from
flicking through the racks and bins, then turned to one another, agog.
So it might have been Boulez at that time, or others of that ilk,
from where he’d go back to the eyrie he was known to inhabit
among his antique clocks and furniture; his Parnassian mode.
Later, it was said that he might even have been depressed at times,
‘somewhere else’ when the call for him to join the battle required
his characteristic aggression and drive. But he was troubled
by Mahler, who prescribed abandoning 19 out of 20
ideas every day. That’s how I see him now: all he can hear
is that final coda behind the sense of crisis, the raised tones
around the table; those sparse, lingering notes demand that he change
his life, not the country’s. A symphony must be like the world, says
Mahler to Sibelius; why not vice-versa? broods the PM.
The first time I watched
Skull Murphy at work
I’d watch TV while my grandmother baked and roasted,
and today the wrestling was on: some guy
performing a knee drop onto another guy’s elbow,
held outstretched beneath him. It wasn’t that,
so much as every time he did,
the young man’s head bobbed up and down in agony;
again and again, that awful motion with his head,
as if affirming his pain each time those knees landed.
Bubba must have come in and noticed the hold
I was held by before the screen. I heard her offer
to go outside and help my grandfather, up a ladder
with his old, blunt shears, hacking at the hedge.
It wasn’t so much the violence I was watching for the first time,
but how hard I found it just to look away,
for all my distance from that tiny screen.
© Isi Unikowski
Isi Unikowski lives in Canberra, Australia. He has been widely published in Australia and overseas, including Best of Australian Poems 2022. His collections ‘Kintsugi’ (2022) and ‘Re:Vision’ (2025) are published by Puncher & Wattman, New South Wales. His published poetry can be viewed at https://www.isiunikowski.net.