I don’t like what you tried to do
what you did
Xerxes did before you
lash the sea
lash the sea out of spite
flog that elastic strength
into the submissive firmness of a road
or at least he tried to.

I will not wear the patter of your hobnailed boots
I will not be the highway for your loot
I will not lie down
I will not surrender the curve
the playful arching of my back
the wiggle-room waves crave
in the great sloshing to-and-fro turmoil
inside the heart’s barnacle-covered cave

I am my own man not yours.

Whatever I choose to be
form I take
representation of my will
light flung hung on the ceiling
bouncing around barnacles
in a great guffaw of mirth
being free
no stone-sucking barnacle I
am by nature’s law the man I am.

I am my own man not yours.

So should the wind trip along the wild tongue 
of water
roaring from the sky’s throat
 I shall explode from my cave
and skud along 
the white-whipped surf without a boat.

I am my own man not yours.

 

---

 

Each of us is a battlefield between raw energy that scarcely tolerates restrictions and an orderly spirit that we acquire through social discipline. It is an old story and free verse is well suited to telling it.

Current edit: 23 May 2014

 

At day’s end, when I complete some task,
It is with pleasure that I descry,
Just limping along through the gathering dusk,
A wallaby on my property.

She gets here through a barbed-wire fence,
Clambering under somehow, and tall grass,
A covert where dingoes might hide in suspense
To ambush my uninvited guest.

She comes for the lawn that I keep cut,
The acre I mow and I would mow
In any case, whether she came here or not;
Well I have no reason to object.

The grass I keep cut is fresh and green
And nothing she does can alter that:
A meal for the wallaby makes a nice scene
And both of us benefit from it.

A wallaby isn’t a movie or a book
But what harm will all my looking do?
What about all the chances I took
Limping my way to something new?

And yet I never risked as much
As she does and never with such cause.
She carries a baby in her pouch.
Like eyelashes are those peeping paws.

 

---

 

The courage of a mother wallaby is a beautiful thing to watch because she comes so delicately, not at all like a wild thing. Sadly, it isn’t all beauty. A wallaby carries ticks. I lost my 5 month old puppy to tick poisoning recently and the tick was almost certainly carried by her or some other native mammal. There is an animal track through the long grass around my dam and I suspect that is where the the tick hijacked my unsuspecting pup. Bye Baby Biggles. Luv u always.

There is a tree upon the neighbouring hill,
The sky behind it, all alone up there,
Whose branches, I imagine, grasp the air
As if it took its final breath, that still
Moment in life when life drinks in its fill
And knows itself to be. The hill is bare
Except for that, for farmers cannot spare
Space for mere trees. Mere trees take grass from cattle.

Why do I think I know how that tree feels?
Why do I feel as if we feel as one?
What in me goes up there? What in me kneels
To life that stands upon a hill alone?

Farmers live off the land and grass must grow
But men will breathe their last.  The tree knows.

 

 

.

 

---

Farmers are close to the natural world but they can also be very remote from Nature. But who am I to criticise? They grow things. I eat what they produce. Meanwhile I breathe in what the trees produce. Current edit: 24 June 2014

You call me murderer just coz I killed
That farmer, but it’s innocent I pleads.
He called my cannabis a pile of weeds.
Don’t weeds grow best in a neglected field?
Well ‘e was just a nuisance so I drilled
‘im full of ‘oles like I was plantin’ seeds
And still ‘e gripped me throat like one that needs
Must fight his fill. So I say ‘e’s been filled.

And it’s not like I am the only one.
The judge there drives ‘is flash car when ‘e’s stoned.
It aint black powder in the copper’s gun.
Is it illegal only when it’s growned?

But us men of the world know ‘ow to deal:
Manslaughter 2, suspended on appeal?

 

.

---

Usually a sonnet is the amber in which poets study the lovely butterfly of intellectualised feeling. Here I have used it to trap a dirty cockroach. The speaker is the remnant of a human being, an apt spokesman for  a corrupt and dehumanised lifestyle – but still a man in spite of that.

Current edit:

26 August 2015

25 April 2016

Spring brings the face to mind, eyes green as buds,
Skin clear as air annihilating space,
The conflagration that’s her hair the blood’s
Intoxication with that perfect face.

Summer suggests her manner, bright and warm,
The rose that lifts the room, that careless air,
Those folded hands, the action giving form
To something hidden but felt everywhere.

Autumn speaks with her voice, the gold that clings
In farewell to the trees, the rich, sweet plum
That stores the summer sun, the bird that sings
As doors are shut of warmer days to come.

Winter is a bare and barren time of year.
It sums her up the best: she isn’t here.

 

***************************************

If you head due north or due south
You won’t go east or west;
If you talk only with your mouth
Your hands and eyes will rest
In silence. If a baseball bat
Is your idea of sport
All you will play with is just that.
What will you do when caught?
If only God is God then He
Or She or maybe It
Is stuck with an eternity
That won’t let poor God quit.
Forget your God, your south, your north,
Your bat, your hands, your eyes
For none of all these things is worth
Anything if life dries
Out, shrinking, gathered in one spot.
Thus the cicada steps
From its shell, breathing in the hot
Summer air from tree tops.

.

---

Current edit: 9 June 2015, reworked from ‘Quixotic Song’. Looks good for now.

---

 

You see the Tower of Babel
In the stained window of the chapel
And, under it, yourself, a knight recumbant
Upon a cold sarcophagus? How the light slumbers
Like dreams in summer haunting glassy shallows
Lazily fingered by the willows
One quiet afternoon!

Those colours you see strewn
Are lyrics from the Tower of Babel,
Once magic phrases, words unheard, unable
To rouse the marble knight from his too awful calm,
Who never stirs on hearing any psalm
Or music through ten thousand years,
So much stone blocks your ears,

So much stone seals your eyes.
Or are you petrified with lies,
A spell-bound victim of the Tower of Babel,
With no mind of your own, a cold corpse on a table
Under a bright light, under such a weight
God knows how many years? Too late
To change things now, the Tower

Of Babel has no power
Nor will to raise you from the dead
And yet you think you think he moved his head?
Was it some trick of that deceptive Tower of Babel,
Whose language alters like the sun, unstable
And shifting in its accents, or
What was it that you saw

Within the stone awakened,
What flower stirring in the vacant
Space of a heart encased in such surrender
That it can feel no poetry however tender
Unless it rains down from a Tower of Babel,
Unsure if all you hear is babble
Or if you see the light?

How hard to get things right
When all the time we have is short,
When so much lies beyond our powers of thought,
Here underneath the towers that watch and rule the world,
Believers or, with some rock picked up and hurled,
Fugitives from the Tower of Babel
‘s broken dream, childish fable!

The colours fade, night falls.
The glass is dark now like the walls.
Pity the beggars in their marble shrouds,
The ash of vanished dreams patrolled by listless crowds,
Eyes rummaging the laneways for a fire,
Flames in a dustbin rising higher
Than the lost Tower of Babel.

 

---

 

This draft looks OK to me for now.

Current edit: 14 June 2014

There is a python ten feet long,
As quiet as a mouse,
A muscle flexible and strong
That hangs around my house,

Feeding – on what? I never ask:
Maybe the neighbours’ cats
Or, with them gone, he has the task
Of getting rid of rats.

But in this country pythons never,
I have been told, eat blokes
Or, if one tried, however clever,
He fails at last and chokes,

So if some day you see me in
A coloured leather coat,
Help me! It is a python’s skin
And I’m stuck in his throat.

*****************************

I have a lot of tree frogs around my house and therefore I have a lot of tree snakes. I don’t mind the green tree snakes. They don’t get bigger than six feet and they are pythons i.e. they are not venomous. But lately a ten foot carpet python has moved in and I am a bit wary of treading on it in the dark. I also have brown snakes at ground level and they are highly venomous. So when I go outside in summer, I am not sure if I should look up or down.

Toowoomba is, according to the census,
A city, but by consensus
Among the locals, just a pleasant country town,
And yet the mountains, running up the coast
Like a Great Barrier Reef thrust high on land,
Would have you understand
Toowoomba has the right to boast
Itself to be the gateway to the Darling Downs.

The mountains then must have the final word:
This city or, if preferred,
This town, is destined to be some place rather grand,
Not just a town where returned soldiers place
Another monument to distant wars,
Or somewhere travellers pause
For petrol and a bite in case
No other town soon peeps out from the hinterland,

But a successful town where you might see
Some kind of art gallery.
I saw it when I had repairs done to the car
And, having time to spare, I sauntered in
Just out of curiosity, that’s all.
It’s by the City Hall
Right in the centre of the town
Where anything you really needed isn’t far.

There is a souvenire shop just inside
And a nice lady, a guide,
Who answers questions or just greets you with a smile
And leaves you then to make your way around.
The first rooms I explored were full of stuff
By high school kids, enough
To make me think I might have found
Some other sort of place nearby more worth my while.

Across the hall, in glass display cases,
Jewelry (not such as graces
Stylish attire but such as no-one ever wears,
Made out of bits and pieces ‘artists’ scrounged
From anywhere at all) was placed to seem
Like comments on a theme.
Intrigued but unimpressed, I lounged
And looked around to kill more time then went upstairs.

Here I would find real art, I had supposed,
But ropes announced it closed,
A tradesman on a ladder working with some Streeton
And some McCubbin oils his audience.
Two rooms stayed open: nineteenth century
Bric-a-brac handed free
To the town by men of some eminence
Long ago. There I felt like gold too thinly beaten.

Downstairs, I saw the jewelry anew,
Not something done but to do,
Not ornaments constructed from just anything
But rather people living for their art,
Sorting through cast-off plastic, thrown-out tin
For somewhere to begin
Mending lives long since torn apart,
Creating out of junk the heart’s awakening.

The school-kid stuff now took me by surprise
With its unself-conscious cries
For help or for attention, everything laid bare,
The sea of youth under a bright horizon
Stirring with such intrinsic drama I
Saw myself passing by
With all our generations always rising
And falling, each the ruin each one must repair.

And then I thought, had I youth’s energy,
Demanding to remain free,
Pent up within me, I would wear a paper crown
As if it were a real one made of gold.
Toowoomba then would be my Camelot
From where I would allot
To all good folks in this wide world
The glory of a city, the kindness of a town.

 

**********************************************

Wikipedians are like a small town with the vices of a big city, whereas I live near a small city with many of the virtues of a big town. Wikipedians talk about ‘community’ as if they know what it means but their vices contradict them.

Winter renews landscapes by breaking things down.
It strips the leaves from gaudy, giddy trees
Culled from the world’s gardens to colour the town
And strangles exiled fish in ponds that freeze,
Dead things abounding.

Padded with clothes, human steam-engines appear vast
And pass puffing their insides out in white clouds,
Nostrils on fire. Moulded by winter, they’re cast
Not like themselves in their own forms but the crowd’s,
Shapeless yet lasting.

When will we see summer return, a real face
Reddened with smiles? When will we see, as in youth,
Nature’s real form, slender limbs moving with grace?
Dare I say it? When will we break out the truth
From its hard, old case?

Winter renews landscapes by breaking things down.
It heaps dead forms into mounds of fertile mould,
Clearing from rank ponds the desires that had grown
Tangled and tired, barren and broken and old,
Fresh hopes abounding.

---

This poem is an adaptation of the Sapphic stanza, named after the Greek poetess of love, Sappho, but used also by the Greek poet of war and hardship, Alcaeus.

Current edit:

22 June 2014

26 August 2015