When fire is bestirred
And the men begin rowing
The word is her aspect
Is singing itself
There is calm in her stance
With the dark of the land
Running under the boat
In its furrows of moving
When sail finds the air
Like a house on a hillside
She is warmth in the wool
And the flight of the curlew
Like whisper of nightfall
Or sky in a lake
And O she is the band
At a dancehall
Dorothy Parkinson
Writer of bittersweet reviews and short stories. Member of the famous Alqongwoin ‘Drunks’ group.THE STORY SO FAR
Poland works nicely,
Chad’s going well,
Burma’s precisely
Successful as hell,
Haiti is lovely,
This time of year,
Sudan is just darling,
Thank God for Zaire,
Chile’s a dish,
Brazil is a dream,
South Africa’s bliss,
And Iran is a scream.
Go lease a car,
Go purchase a suit,
Everything’s ducky,
And I’m King Canute.
b. b. hummings
b.b. drove an ambulance in World War I and was mistakenly imprisoned by the French. He never fully recovered and returned to Australia in some confusion. Tragically, he did not know he wrote poetry. He thought it was ‘just a lot of nonsense’.74
this bit
foll
owe
db
y
this bit
and
then
this bit
over here
seasons change and leaves go up or down
coolman;unmanuncool
(nothing)
?
huh?
Ogden Gnash
Ogden Gnash was perhaps the best known of the Perth poets.PARDON ME MADAM BUT IS THAT MANDIBLE ON A LEASH OR WHAT?
Of all the tenets mentioned in discussions about levity,
By far the most important and the best of them is brevity,
So Shakespeare and Railway Timetables and instruction manuals in foreign languages apart,
Be, of all literary forms, most suspicious of the poem which is almost entirely parenthetical and despite whose Towards More Picturesque Speech homely cleverness in the Norman Rockwell manner, leaves you wondering whether you’ve left the gas on and whether you’ve got to throw another six to start.
Sir Don Betjeman
Don represented Victoria in cricket, tennis, golf and car-spotting. Wrote The Shell Guide for Victorian Motorists. He worked in television during the 1960s and released the names of every architect employed on the Albury-Wodonga Development Project. He lived in Malvern and was King of Moomba in 1972.ANOTHER SUBALTERN’S WEDDING
When I saw you at the service,
Didn’t have the guts to speak,
Should have, can’t think why I didn’t,
Perfect oppo up the creek.
Back at the Reception Centre,
All those lovely downy thighs,
Waitress asked me if I’d like some
Herbert Adams party pies.
After bouncy hot Gay Gordon,
You and I became a pair,
What a thrill! Joy unconfined!
At Berlei stockists everywhere.
In the carpark, Jowett Javelin,
Triumph of post-war design,
Hugged the road to Mount Eliza,
Hard beside the Frankston line.
Past the Dendy, through Moorabbin,
Near St Kilda Football Ground,
Mentone, Mordialloc, Carrum,
Seaford next and homeward bound.
Off the Melway briefly, poppet,
Up the Old Road, rally style,
Let me, dear, into your secret,
Silken delta of the Nile.ADVICE TO CHAPS FROM PARENTS
Whatever you do, don’t touch yourself down there,
And if you want to know something, ask me,
Or if I’m not available, a prayer;
For God’s sake don’t ask Uncle Dorothy.
Stewie Smith
Stewie spent most of her working life as a secretary, although she is better known for her poetry, as is frequently the case in Australia.FURTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK
There ought to be a monument
Put up in the public square,
To honour the memory of the
Unknown Person from Porlock,
Who paid the supreme sacrifice
That certain others might live.
They have got it wrong
The Coleridge people,
What they have got is wrong,
The Person from Porlock has been
Wickedly misunderstood,
It is too late now of course,
It is too late.
I yearn for the second coming
Of the Person from Porlock,
I anticipate the epiphany and have left instructions
That I am to be disturbed
The moment my thoughts are assembled.
If somebody else does not do it,
One of these frosty Fridays
I might just do it myself.
Who are these blessed people
Who complain their ideas won’t come?
Don’t they know what it is like?
May we have their names please?
They ought to unfurl a crimson runner,
They ought to welcome Him,
He is Our Saviour you see,
For he brings the precious gift
Of interruption,
World not without end,
Amen.
I can see I’m not helping,
You do not want to hear this, I know,
But how, other than with distress
Are we to respond to our thoughts?
Imagine not having an imagination.
We are trapped, don’t you see?
The way to heaven is hell.
W. H. Auding
Wisty Huge Auding published his first collection, Poems, in 1928, followed by A Whole Lot More in 1932 and When We Were Very Old in 1960. He died in 1968, 1971, and again in 1973.MUSE OF BAUXITE
About Telecom they were never wrong,
The Old Masters, how prescient they were
About existential services;
How well they knew the mundane brutality of increasing charges for items which don’t exist,
How, while oafs deliberate, holding money
Up to the light, agreeing it should be described
Not as a profit but as an operating surplus,
There always must be, bleak-faced, random and frantic,
Victims, trying to make urgent calls on public phones dangling
From walls in a twisted piss-smelling tardis,
And in the distance a man sits on a park bench,
Explaining to his grandchild the merits of competition.
In Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, for instance, how everyone’s face
Is either hidden or green; hidden, encased
In metal, in uniform, angled, straight and hard,
Or green, and how, when Scanlon is shot from his horse
And falls, he falls up,
Unsurprised, a bystander,
He’s thinking, ‘Dearie me,
Another ballsup.’
Louis ‘The Lip’ MacNeice
Recruited from northern Tasmania in 1925, MacNeice became one of the mainstays of Australian verse between the wars.
WHAT I DID IN THE HOLIDAYS Section IX
In a week I shall return to the University
And begin again the selection of anecdotes,
Revealing the ageless to the briefly young,
Explaining the dead to the living,
Arranging the facts in a circle and playing
Simon says The Glory of Greece.
Balance your chair on the bookcase,
Study the dust in a shaft of light,
And listen to the familiar stories,
Nod with the names, salute the heroes,
The paragons, the exceptions that prove the rules;
Plato, Diogenes, Alcibiades,
The Thracian vases, Delphi on a clear day,
Liking the Spartans less because we
Could never do that with our young.
Observe the neat morals, the perfect natural laws,
The foundations of modern justice:
At least one foot must be on the floor
While towing Hector around the walls of Troy.
Gentlemen are requested to
