Tuesday poem: Mouth brooding
April 30, 2012
Mouth brooding
In damp mulch, he swallows young like knowledge.
In a quiet vocal sac (now choked from croak)
they flow into commas, hoping to punctuate
the forest’s leafy library of tales. He spits!
Out pops a haiku of wiggle,
a soft finger of amphibian,
pooling into an anthology of puddle.
Seven froglet booklets, sprightly as thoughts,
swim towards their future. Must this language,
this webbed poem, be forever lost?
P.S. Cottier
Hop in! There's no recycling either.
The mouth brooding frog, of Chile and Argentina, also known as Darwin’s frog, is related to the gastric brooding frogs (I am not making this up) that used to live in Australia but which are now presumed extinct. The female gastric brooder would swallow her young; the male mouth brooder does the same sort of thing, but in a slightly less thorough way. I believe there were two types of gastric brooding frog, both now gone, as recently as the 1980s. I have to check this, but I believe that the cane-toad which continues to munch its way through a lot of our wild-life, may originally have come from Chile, via Hawaii. (Our fault, not Chile’s!) So there’s another terrific amphibian link with that country.
Here’s a link to an Australian site with information about frogs and frog conservation. And an American one. You’ll have to google it yourself for elsewhere.
For more poetry, hopefully less depressing, hop over (sorry, it’s addictive) to the Tuesday poem site, by clicking this feather:
Tuesday poem: Mental cases by Wilfred Owen
April 23, 2012
Mental cases
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, – but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
– These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
– Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
– Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
Wilfred Owen
the building in the back fills the one in the front
And on ANZAC day, 25th April, let’s not forget that we still send young men (and women now, too) over to do the dirty work for us all; or at least in our countries’ names. I would like to see Australia’s troops only here for the defence of Australia, and fuck the geopolitics. But it’s usually old men (and the occasional middle aged woman) who make the decisions that cost young men their lives or sanity.
Not to mention the civilians, who have no special day of remembrance. It’s appropriate to remember the dead, but it would make more sense if we didn’t take actions that guarantee that we are making more of them.
Click the black feather to go to the Tuesday poetry hub in the country that contributed the rest of the ANZACs.
Scout troop Australia
March 1, 2012
Kevin Rudd has always annoyed me. The carefully modulated voice that sounds like a school principal circa 1970. The hideous mind-numbingly boring speeches. When he won the election back in ’07 and he gave the most tedious speech possible I knew we were in for a frustrating time. That man can stub out joy like his mouth was a soggy ashtray. (He did do the ‘Sorry’ speech, but that was properly written.)
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the speech when he was toppled by Gillard, but even that became tedious. I don’t think he’s capable of talking for a short time; a bit like Castro used to be, but I’m sure Kevin would win in any tedious speech contest with Fidel. (In fact he’d probably finish Fidel off through boring him to death, and do what the CIA was unable to accomplish for all those years. Give that man a poisoned cigar!)
I also disliked his giving quick interviews from the steps of church, which seemed to be a very American thing to do. (“Look at me, I’m a Christian.”) If it weren’t for the precarious state of the Labor Party in Parliament, I’d hope he’d resign. But no doubt he’ll be waiting until after the next election to make another move.
And compared to Tony Abbott’s politics, Kevin Rudd is almost palatable.
This poem (or dramatic monologue, perhaps) was written in an attempt to work through how annoying his way of speaking is; the unspoken supposition that seems to be there that we are all idiots. Except for Kev. I make a reference to his visit to a strip club in America in the poem; what annoyed me about that was his assertion that he couldn’t remember because he’d had too much to drink, rather than the thing itself, which is no more than tacky. I also refer to the outcry over Bill Henson’s photographs of a nude thirteen year old girl, works that Rudd referred to as ‘revolting‘. Those photographs are not pornographic, whatever one thinks of Henson.
Scout troop Australia
For Kevin Rudd
Are you listening? Working families sent you here,
children, so work you will. Tie that slip-knot tighter,
and line up straight. There will be no nude kiddies
in my scout troop, girlie. Disgusting, like an unsettling
wind, blowing ideas where they have no right to
be thought. Mandarin may be spoken, so long as that too
bores the listener into a fester of panic, like a band-aid
placed on a scabby ear, and ripped off by millimetres,
forever and forever and forever, each passing day.
Put down that filthy under-taxed fizzy booze, irritating child.
Have you done all of your homework? Wash your hands!
Have we all read sufficiently big briefs? Don’t giggle, naughty
revolting one, I meant paper, not undies, as you certainly know.
We have a visitor. The hirsute fellow nodding in the corner?
That’s God, of course, the fiscally responsible God of Working Families.
He drove a sensible, reasonably priced car to be here with us tonight.
He gives sufficiently incomprehensible thought to regional co-operation.
He puffs out cheeks and purses lips about the environment.
An occasional break-out will be forgiven, by God Over There,
so long as it involves poles and undies so brief as to be mere
commas in a speech about the need for Australian working
families, who are, after all, the setting cement of our society,
and who do fleetingly and regrettably get pissed, and ogle like
Tasmanian owls on cocaine, to be sufficiently supported
by proper and formerly fully funded fiscal policy.
Salute. Wake up, put down that dreadful marijuana and salute.
Who put those undies on the flag-pole? I’m waiting, children.
No-one’s going anywhere until the guilty one confesses,
and writes neatly a hundred thousand times:
I will stay awake and listen; heaven is a decent place,
and beauty is just one short step away from waste.
Tuesday poem: ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ by A.B. (Banjo) Paterson
January 23, 2012
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just “on spec”, addressed as follows: “Clancy, of The Overflow”.
And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written in a thumbnail dipped in tar)
‘Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
And I somehow fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal —
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of “The Overflow”.
'...that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' (?) The sun seems to be located near Broome.
Yes, I’m going into fervent Australian mode as Thursday 26th January is Australia Day, or as some like to call it, Dags with Flags Day. Anyone who dabbles in this blog will now that criticism of aspects of Oz society is rampant to a positively un-Australian degree, so this classic 1889 verse from Banjo Paterson may raise me back to the golden realm of unadulterated, frolicking patriotism. (My shallow cynicism is in fact a cover for an embarrassingly gushy love for this country, but let’s pretend I’m not feeling that at all, shall we? Love is so much harder to write about than anything else, and I wouldn’t want to fall short.)
Actually, I love this poem too, particularly the ‘thumb-nail dipped in tar’. The longing for the pure realm of the bush that this poem exemplifies is something that still marks Australian poetry. Ask anyone where the best-known Australian poet lives today, and they’ll point to Bunyah and Les Murray, not to Sydney and…anyone in Sydney.
The suspicion of the urban environment, even in one of the most urbanised of economies, also lives on, I think. Real men are out there somewhere, with the kelpies and the sheep, in the ‘virginal’ bush, roaming as free as the public domain status of this poem. (Just don’t mention the previous ownership…I don’t mean the poem.)
A word about flags. The Australian flag is definitely seen much more than it was when I was a child. Not on public buildings so much; I remember having to recite something like ‘I love God and my country/ I will honour the flag/ and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law’ at primary school. Boys actually saluted the flag during this, while girls preened and made scones. But today we do see more private display of the Australian flag. Is this:
(a) because we ape America in everything, even flag-waving, although it’s a different flag?;
(b) people have more money, because of our flogging huge amounts of iron ore and uranium (and other good stuff) overseas?; or
(c) flags are cheaper now, and we receive millions of plastic ones back from the countries we sell huge amounts of iron ore and uranium (and other good stuff) to, in an equitable and sensible exchange?
I really don’t know, but I find these public displays of private flags very strange indeed. I worry about how their display might be related to charming bumper stickers such as ‘I Grew Here You Flew Here’, and ruder variations thereof. Not that you see many of them in Canberra: you’re more likely to read ‘Refugees Welcome’ in the ACT. But as I hear constantly, Canberra is not Australia.
Enough. Screed is bordering on The Burning Slough of Rant.
If the cloying smell of cattle or the sticky feeling of the wool emanating from this piece is disturbing you (or perhaps the premature reek of a million sausages on a million barbies is getting up your nose?) please head over to the Tuesday Poem Site, where the vowels may be a little rounder and the patriotism seems slightly more occluded, at least from a distance. (Until the next rugby thing, anyway.)
Poem from a hammock
January 2, 2012
It’s perfect weather, about 30 degrees. I’ve been swimming twice today, and saw dolphins, black cockatoos and Brazilian tourists; all very pretty. Tomorrow a new Test match starts. There’s always a new Test match at this time of year, and then there’s tennis, or should I say Tennis, in Melbourne. This poem relates to the Boxing Day Test at the MCG, and was written as India came out to bat. (I’m a quick poet, so I finished this before their innings was over…)
I know there’s still a world somewhere outside this huge brown hammock of a country, but in the middle of Summer, at the beach, that seems like an unlikely dream. Here’s a lazy sonnet from a currently rather lazy country:
Every Summer
The flat green bird, flecked with white,
squawks all Summer in the corner.
Clarke, Ponting, Hilfenhaus, Warner
versus Dhoni and Dravid (the one to dislike).
There’s a shadow plays just behind this match
for something odd occurred at Bellerive,
concerning Kiwis, still hard to believe.
So in case something else weird should hatch,
there’s a certain anxiety beneath our banter.
India’s chasing two hundred and ninety-two.
(Difficult, but not impossible to do.)
But I think we’ll win now, in a canter.
And when it’s over, and the song is sung,
silence pounds out its ghostly runs.
P.S. Cottier
Seams? I know not seams.
Best wishes to anyone active enough to be surfing the net. I’ll be back in full hardworking poetry-factory mode soon enough. When I extract myself from the comfortable myth of perfection. Happy new year to everyone.
(And after a lot of thought – for they still pop up in Australia in Summer – I can’t mention New Zealand in a light-hearted poem without at least acknowledging the new earthquakes that happened over the holiday period. I read the ugly words like ‘liquefaction’ and have no idea what that would really mean, except that it must be terrifying to be in Christchurch when these tremors/quakes occur.)
Update: I realise now, having visited some news sites, that as I was drafting this entry, another major tremor hit Christchurch. I hope that the damage was minimal.
PS Cottier 