Poems.
Of people, times and places.
Y’know..
I go outside in the mornin’
Pause..take in th’ weather..;yawnin’,
Mark how the dawnin’ sun
Gives the silver’d branches of the Mallee
A dun coloured sheen…nice ‘n clean.
Matching the wing of a galah
Tight-cling’d there…..on a spar.
An’ I’m thinking..
In this quiet, morning haste
That one oughta’ feel some poetry
Whilst in such a place..
But then…ah..it’d just be a waste…
xxxxxxx
A Summer Evening Walk.
A melodious whistle serenades the Summer evening air,
A gentler light falls tonight upon the buildings where
I walk a solitary walk down the empty street,
In company to the tune I whistle, my foot falls to the beat.
And I murmur simple flattery to the prism of the sky,
It’s strata’d colours ascending in layered symmetry.
My eye is caught by a flutter of geraniums upon a wall,
A host of colour trembling, a sight to be enthralled!
A woman appears, a laughing toss of golden, long-tressed hair,
Her laughter balanced the moment caught,
. . . I stop whistling to admire.
You know…treasures can be stolen from life’s relentless drudge,
That would sweep our eyes, our ears, our heart ever over its fidgeting edge.
Then…I continue my melodious whistle serenading the evening Summer air,
A gentler light…I feel…falls tonight,
Upon these buildings here.
xxxxxxx
The Tide.
Like a sailor old, who watches the tide,
Life’s many moods I do abide…and still I watch,
For there comes a wash of the river flow,
That carries the ebb, what comes and goes.
That “tide in men’s lives” that carries their thoughts,
Like flotsam swept before a wave wild wrought
By wind and storm or by deceiving calm they be brought,
To wreck upon Charybdis rocks or wash up on rugged tor.
Fortune for that sailor who with astute eye,
Will risk the temper of mood and tide,
And call the exact moment makes best to ride.
He casts the ropes that hold him belay,
All wind and storm be no delay.
Yet I and thee, chained to life’s fickle destiny,
Can but watch as the vessel sails away from we,
While idly biding…
Like empty shells scattered on a wide, broad shore,
Awaiting tide and waves also, to move us ever-more…”
xxxxxxx
Ah..growing old has its mercies..but also its regrets…would that one could drink from Ponce de León’s fountain of youth..I’m sure I would not let so many chances slip by…
If only..:
Would my wit be a sage much wiser.
Would my courage be somewhat bolder.
Would that time could take me back yonder,
To de León’s youthful fountain mythical . . .
There in a blush of delight so typical,
Would I and thee..as Adam and Eve,
As those children in the garden of Ede’,
Brighten our eyes to that first sight,
Of a new dawn rising over the mountain’s height.
If only. . .
xxxxxxx
Ode to Women’s beauty.
Speechless and numb, I gazed on her beauty there,
Her limbs, her hands, her soft flowing hair.
Her voice the whisper of an angel’s prayer..
SHE..roamed her eyes over the banquet fair,
The roasts, the salads, the fruits so rare,
And of my adoration, just so….au contraire.
“There is so much beauty before us here ,
It is so hard to decide….you tell me, my dear,”..
She said..”What to you is the most desirous fare?”
xxxxxxx
The Rose and the Plough.
In the back-blocks of the mallee
‘Neath Mrs. MacFarlane’s sill,
Grew a rose bush many years ago,
(I ponder it’s there still?).
“ ‘Twas planted for my Louise
When she was newly born.
I mark the contrast of the rose:
The blossom above the thorn!”
MacFarlane ploughed the dry soil of that block
With machines tended of sweat and tears.
While Louise blossomed with the rose
All through her growing years.
But age slowly wearied him,
The years of labour took their toll.
So young Tim Brey that season worked the plough
And a bumper crop did sow.
Creeping fingers of evening shadow
Edged ’round mallee scrub and tree,
As Tim drove through the station gate
And Louise, he did suddenly “see”.
One warm evening ‘neath a mallee tree,
With the harvesting finally done,
The “old man” grumbled toward the house
While Tim and Louise talked on alone.
A silence fell after all was talked about
With dusk thru’ dust aglow.
Tim clasped the bough above her head
And leant toward his “rose”…
…The wind would move the fields of grain,
A swollen swirling “sea”:
Of “ebb and flow” in the crops
On the Breys’ new property…
Themselves now grown so old,
Their children too have flown.
But still the rose bush given
For their wedding blossoms on.
The mallee is not so prosperous,
The price has gone from wheat.
The farm is dusty, the house too old;
Deep lines fan Louise’s cheek.
Tim Brey harrows still with his plough
The “home paddock” into rows,
While Louise battles with their accounts,
As dust silently falls-on the petals-of the rose.
xxxxxxx
A cold night on the range.
Was the year after the blast that ended it all,
Not a whole room left standing..just rubble and sprawl,
And we were camp’d freezing amongst it all.
With nary a stick to burn to keep us warm,
But a box full of books packed in haste,
A box full of books found buried among waste.
So we lit a fire with those learned tomes,
Warmed our hands to the rhymes of poems,
And in jest to our plight using the fire we might
Read a line or two and laugh with vulgar delight!
“Here’s a good one”…Louise called out,
Holding the screed aloft in theatrical tout,
And with an exaggerated voice of stage,
Read those prescient words from the page;
“When first the tottering house begins to sink,
Thither goes all the weight by an instinct”.
A moody silence fell from those words,
A warning wasted from a long-lost world,
The predicted path of how it all fell…
Wisdom in the silence, it’s echo did tell…
‘Twas Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy”,
Come to think..I recall..but whatever ‘twas,
It made good fire…a roaring good fire for us all.
Freezing our bones amid the sprawl.
xxxxxxx
The Secret.
Ladies…
I know a little secret,
I’ll not share with other men.
It’s deep, it’s dark, it’s truth is stark,
It’s come down millennium.
It’s so complex that a genius,
Would have to give it a rest,
Yet, so disarmingly simple..
A child could tell it best.
I first heard it’s whisper in the wild oats,
Whose husks had shed their seed.
The breezes hustled the golden sheaths,
Where small lizards scurried beneath.
It was told me in the cries of birds,
The scratching bark of the mallee tree.
It was told me in my lover’s embrace,
When we kissed our anniversary.
The secret came from the other side,
Of the wide, vast universe.
But it really started right here and now,
In the confines of this Earth.
It is nothing strange or unusual,
But it can never be told.
It is as young as a first desire,
As a drama about to unfold and
As needed and as fought for,
As the last breath of the old.
The secret was known to those,
That first built ancient Athens town,
That sculptured the mighty Empire of Rome..
And then in anger tore both down.
It was known to Cleopatra,
When as concubine she went to Caesar
But when in the time of anarchy,
Presented as a Queen to Marc Antony.
It was sought by Van Gogh’s sad postman,
His crows in a wheaten field,
It was held in the breast of Manet’s
Absinthe Drinker’s desolate gaze.
It is a hunger never satiated,
A thirst never quenched.
A vein to mine as rich as Croesus ,
Yet a pauper would have more wealth.
But..
It is denied to the cruel and greedy,
Those seekers of mammon and of wealth.
For it can be seen in their gold and silver ,
Their envy and their pelf.
That there, at the base of every grand building,
Be built of marble or Platinum.
Lay the broken, twisted bodies ,
Of abandoned, homeless humans.
So they will never be rewarded,
With it’s velvet glove of desire,
Their hands too full already,
Their eyes too blind to inquire.
So :
Ladies…
There is this little secret that ,
I’ll not share with other men.
It’s deep, it’s dark , it’s truth rather stark.
Though the wording mostly unseen.
You may know it or at least sense it,
For it was whispered you at birth.
You wear it as a heritage,
You shed it at your death.
Though you may not explain it fully,
There are times , I think you know..
When the call of men and children,
Must need your attention most of all.
I promise I will never reveal it,
Because that secret is held you see..
In a knowing look , a furtive wink,
exchanged in passing,
Just between you and me.
xxxxxxx
Three blows on the church bell meant a child, twice three a woman and thrice three a man. After a pause the years were counted out at approximately half-minute intervals. The word teller in some dialects becomes tailor, hence the old saying “Nine tailors maketh a man”.
The Day.
I stare at the wet leaves
Of the Camellia bush,
In the patio..In the rain.
As I take in with my eyes,
I stir the cup of tea.
The spoon chimes on the porcelain;
I mind the strikes;
Tailors.
Three..Six..Nine..
“Nine tailors maketh a man”
So much to see out in the patio.
But nothing to absorb.
Just the everyday…
I will forget the vision,
But will remember the peace.
xxxxxxx
A Gap in the Line.
He touched the medals tenderly, the ribbon colours sublime,
The case of burnished velvet, the soft attractive shine,
He touched the medals tenderly, an Uncle’s Great War “shrine”.
Posthumously given for courage, in “closing a gap in the line”.
In closing a gap in the line he died, in mud, gore and slime.
It was for these tokens of honour, he marched, to fill a gap in the line.
With Union men, many of them with those medals he’d proudly stride.
Union men, many of them and a title his Uncle wore with pride.
Himself, a Wharfie, born and bred, right down the family line,
His Uncle too, t’was always said, could lump a hundred-weight a time,
Bagged sugar, sticky with sweat, soaking wet, at eighty tons an hour,
The men would lug from those cargo holds with no break for tucker.
In the Summer strike of ’98 they marched for conditions fair,
When “Patrick” crawled to Howard’s Government to send the coppers there.
Along with the Farmer mercenaries trained by the covert ; “Sandline,”
They sought to break the strikers…to break through a gap in the line.
In the middle of the night they sent in the thugs, the scabs and the dogs,
It was hard to tell which was which among the slavering, crawling hogs.
And deals were made and rights were trade between the ruling class,
That left the strikers on their own to hold the line tight to the last.
Howard set the dogs on the men and the women and children in kind,
Reith, the crawling bastard, banked the scabs through a mercenary company; “Sandline”,
And the Journalist sucks and the Murdoch hacks lent their honour to that shameful crew,
And wrote of “overpaid wharfie bludgers” when of sweat and blood they NEVER knew.
And he saw the look in the breaker’s eyes, he saw the hate confined,
So clasping tight, holding the next striker’s arms with all his might,
He called and bellowed fit to wake in fright..:”Hold boys, Hold!”
“ Hold my bastard boys!…we’ll not let them force a gap in the line!”
There comes a time in everyone’s heart, where honour and justice combine,
We must choose which side we’re marching on..what a sense of honour defines.
Would his Uncle have him march for nought, but just a place in a line,
Or should he honour best his Uncle’s pride with his class aligned.
Today he touches those medals tenderly, with a habit long refined,
But he’ll not march on Anzac Day…not while those Tory scabs declaim,
No..there’ll be a space where he held his place with the others marching time,
And owed in respect for his Uncle’s indebt’..they’ll now see clearly outlined,
That in the place of his marching space…there’ll be a gap in the line.
There’ll be a gap in the line my fellows…there’ll be a gap in the line.
Owed in respect to an Uncle’s indebt’…Today there’s a gap in the line.
xxxxxxx
Just as we guard our treasure lest it be plundered,
So should we treasure our pleasure lest it be squandered.
A lover’s thoughts.
When I laugh,
‘Tis a lover’s laugh..
My love’s smile enough to lift my heart.
When I weep,
‘Tis with a lover’s tears..
My lover is gone and my heart grows drear.
When I lay at night,
‘Tis a lover’s thoughts..
That I think of my lover and my love flows clear,
A rippling stream over flowering fields steeped in snow…
And these thoughts I think, I think my lover knows.
xxxxxxx
Ronin.
Adrift in a sea of language,
The Ronin without a master..
Am I too that same lost soul,
A writer without his muse..
A Teller without a tale,
A wanderer in the lingua franca?
Sing a song for the dreamers,
Whisper a secret for the Lord,
Twist of the knife for a schemer,
The brutal thrust of the sword.
Please remember me my darling,
And don’t forget my name,
For whence those words escape me,
I am not to blame.
xxxxxxx
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