THE PAULINE GROUP A Literary Society SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955 Edited by Julian Woods
Page 4
Part bird and only half ship.
The mast leans forward in strength,
The sails stretch out to full length,
The canvas billows strong
Lifting the vessel along.
Sea in the air, on the lips.
Sea, and the time ruffled sands -
Why need he think out there,
Leaning, the wind in his hair?
His heritage comes with the tide,
Cool water, his house, his fair bride.
THE CAMILLIA TREE
Pacita Moore
The old stone cottage blinked in the spotlight
Of gold from the sun.
Its walls stood square, but he grey shingle roof
Dipped and curtsied around the chimney
And the doorways gaped onto tenantless rooms.
But the camellia trees,
The two dead camellia trees
Clawed the air with skeleton branches
As I passed by.
KOREAN DAWN
David A. Haig
Low in the west
Venus smiles on the field of Mars.
As the pale light of the glittering east
Shines on a twisted bloated corpse,
Pregnant with stench and putrid slime.
A sentry peers across the upchurned fields,
A lone flower stirs its closed bloom,
A puff of smoke, then shrapnel rains.
As the sun lifts his golden head
And parallel beams of parted light
Stab the cold blue hopeless dawn,
A rifle cracks
Sharp in the stillness of a dying night,
Punctured guts his the gaseous muck of death.
The sentry turns to the lonely flower,
Thrills to the solo song of a distant bird.
But peace has gone with the fading stars
Leaving hate in his place once more.
LINES
J.A. Miles
In the clouds an intermission
Then King Moon’s sneering face.
“Who gave you permission
To stroll about the place?”
The fawning stars began to chime
“My liege we’ll have his head.
At one a.m. we know its time
The kingdom was in bed.”
CUPBOARD LOVE
Roger Challis Brown
They showed us the house - “We’re not sure”,
they said, “we like it, but the garden’s fair.
We don’t want any heavy digging. Fibro. City water.
A place to camp, you know. We may move later.”
Rooms unexpected, floors whose levels
found a step to reconcile their evils,
paneled walls, with rosebuds. Curious shape,
but not unpleasant. Set well up the slope.
“The man we bought from built it, working
at weekends,” they said. “Bit lacking
in conveniences, no copper. Upwards
of two hundred, it’ll need. Plenty of cupboards.”
Cupboards! A hoarding termites nest of them,
doors set in unexpected corners, every whim
recessed on hinges, scorning any disposition
save the lust for acquisition.
“They might be handy, just to keep
small odds and ends,” they said; “We’ll sleep
out here of course.” Now, when we visit there,
the odds are even ends are everywhere.
AT ERA
Robin R. Pratt
--- by courtesy of The Bulletin
At Era when the sun goes down
darkness comes sliding down from the hill,
slipping down the cracks where the creek slips
to the sea.
Then the grazing grass grows a stranger green
as darkness, which on the hillside had stumbled,
twig-crackling, slips quietly now
seeping like water through the grass
and round by the sandhills
to the sea.
There are crows at Era and their cawing
over the huddled hillside bushes
suddenly hurts the ear.
And darkness hides in the mangrove swamp,
imprisoned by the winding pathways there.
Now draw the tentflaps tight, prepare for sleep,
thinking of silence. Now you hear
the wind’s hush in the palm trees
and the crows cry and the waves’ thud falling,
now you dream
strange dreams, and wake bewildered when the dawn is near.
STREET SCENE
Manfred MacKenzie
There is Euridice in the green rain
Beneath the lamp, shattering
Into chips, while the pain
Of the drenched air is humped
In its coat: the light guttering,
Crystallized and jumped.
There Euridici, the rain in your hair
Glistening shrilly do you hear
Orpheus in the café, paying his fare,
Two pennies with his violin
To Charon: cracking do you hear
That sound tired and thin,
Stretched out tight in the grimy light
While the rain threads ravel out.
This light has nerves tonight
Its breath steams: steams in vain.
What are we waiting for? Do we wait
For this street to put on its green again.
From Aircraft Journey
In the small distance are the words,
The words and the speech and hands and eyes,
And each of us alone communes
Precisely with himself and not
With any other: then, over the sea,
Divides in to movement of light on dark,
Putting his awkward elbow comes the sun,
And, oh, aerially move the faces forward
As with the ruin of beveled aluminium
And seeking with the rhythm of valises,
We dispel the bright, split air.
The Pauline Group, 25 June 1953
BRIDGE MOOD
Susan Vacchini
Now we all break the brand around the day
and move through a frayed edge of light.
We have past the hard definition of noon
when the hour is solid,
the minute precise,
We have not yet reached the certainty of darkness
when hot neons bark at us silently
and junction lights are bowls of blue ice
melting into the night.
We are transient now, as greyness,
and like many birds , we crumble
into the grey light.
POEM
Keith Free
Thou red and crimson apparition,
The fabric of my long perdition,
Thou art caged within my heart
Whence thou pluckest my soul apart;
The mathematics of your limbs I find,
Teach me science of far different kind
To that which I formerly had wrought
The mesh and body of my thought:
For thou art a sense and seem to me
The expression of a symmetry
Not learnt in this your world or mine
But chequered forth in remoter time,
While this grace that woos thy form
In a sorcerer’s web my mind deforms;
And thy voice and the lips red-rimmed
Are the vehicle of modern sin,
For a soul it doth speed away
To a paradise of sub-earthern shades,
Whence a saint could but confess
The divinity of its wantonness.
O love, thy eyes deeper myst’ries have
Than demon’s spell at a weird black-mass;
And when this body that your love bears
Is resolved into it
s elements;
All its breath and blood are spent;
And texture fretted to the air,
Then will those atoms of flesh, now dust,
For all eternity chorus my lust.
ALONE ON THE HEADLAND
Judy Forsyth
Twin pools of light,
Sunlight, on the sea.
Ripples crested with light,
Sunlight on the sea.
Two golden pebbles, flung
From the nearby shore,
Where the land rounds a tongue
To lick a tender sore.
Where the yellow rocks hump
From the yellow sand,
Where the leathered trees slump,
Crushed between sky and land.
Here the sea crawls with the tide,
Enfolding with hungry arms,
Pushing the rooks aside,
To embrace in the sandy calms.
Here are more stones to cast
From the shore, to the sea, in the sun.
Stones with the strength to hold fast
The thought that has just begun.
For where there was only intention
Now is perspective contemplation.
Now vibrant glows the sunshine.
Now static lies the shore.
Now encroaches the blue of the sea.
“THE ARGUMENT WAS SIMPLE”
Roger Challis Brown
The argument was simple, only
the calculations were in doubt, the picked bones
tossed to experts caged in wires to quiet
their logarithmic snarls; but finally
their problem would appear plain to plain men
who disliked something attempted spawning
these glum forecasts of confusion.
Movement, striving, chance seized And won;
these were things all could reckon by
without this waiting, paused on the edge
of anger, for a sigh which none would dare
to query and all might obey …
Tell me, who had foretold the answer,
seen the approaching end, the silence?
ANNUNCIATION
Judith Rayner
The peach trees wait,
Flinging their grey branches,
Webbing the lusty earth;
The twigs tremble in love,
In the naked wood.
They stand in pain, and ache
For the blossom to burn
The coldness, break the blueness,
Shatter it like a mirror -
For peace comes with birth.
And the girl by the gate
Held in her parenthood,
Dark-haired, Madonna faced,
Her fingers touched; interlaced,
Like the branches on the trees,
Waits – her eyes lifted to the promise,
The blue promise of the hills -
As if her angel will come
With blossom, and turn
Her heart from memories
Of endless furrows and centuries of soil.
DIDO FOR AENEAS
Manfred MacKenzie
Now my leaf burns as deep glass,
In its late pyre, now, now. I am only
Smoulder, my anger spoken through you.
But the dark wind hurts my mind, blows
Me the children leaves from us, we ringed
In the light. And our house of summer
Was shimmered blade of tree, risen
Palace-leaved while our spring roots
Were flared strongly in the first ground.
Why, how our house it was, the sheaved
Granaries and white woodbird’s dabble
At pebble grounds around our feet.
But my house was on ramped beach,
By your ever-sea, and I think, mined
Gently down with time motion, you hard
Away-wind.
A morning, ah, an early sea
Your ships move pink-gilled into dawn.
From my towered and sea wide eyes
I had seen you; their report, dull news.
Now I cannot think you ever loved me,
My eyes nor hands, you had not feasted
For any small thing.
THE BIRDS OF GOD
From Euripides’ Hippolytus
Translated by Colin Black
Would that from this earth I might depart,
And hide me in the cavers of the night;
That God might place me in his winged flocks
To dwell e’ermore. Then should I turn my flight
To the salt wave of the Adriatic strand,
And the waters of Eridanus: there the tears
Of Phaeton’s sisters weeping on the shore
Fall amber drops on the purple deep.
I would fly to the green isles of the Hesperides,
The gardens that in the sunset dwell,
Where Atlas bears the weight of heaven’s glory,
Where the sea-lord will let sailors no more.
Here lies concealed the holy graves of Zeus,
The haunts of the Immortals, whence flow springs
Ambrosial; and Earth who gives all life
Increases too the happiness of gods.
A DISILLUSIONMENT
David A. Haig
“Was this love?” I cried!
When autumn leaves fell on your lovely hair.
Flush with the joy of a fading day
Side by side in selfless joy we lay;
Your sadness and your joy I promised then to share
After youth’s mad zestful riot should subside.
Life before us stood revealed
The sky, split by a searchlight’s beam.
My hand about your gentle shoulder went;
A shout! our vows of love the heaving heavens rent:
“Come trouble, strife, sorrow in never ending stream;
Our love shall never yield.”
And then all faded to redeem
The shabby walls and lonely hours
When loveless lifeless souls decay
Till ghostlike they plod their weary empty way
And reflect of love’s o’erriding powers
Even in a fleeting dream.
WALKING
Keith Free
These July gymnasium days blow
So hot, cold, off, on, I sweat, freeze
In shivering morning rainbows
Of silky light, gold sheen, walking near
Hoses spraying on college lawns,
Damp stalks ruddy in the warmth.
This currency, coined with eyes, nostrils, mouth
A riches debasing the famous Khans’
Won for nothing from an autumn park.
Yet to most, led up cement paths,
The brown buildings stand citadel, sandstone
Quadrate abstracts in an azure dome,
Kingdom come cased in a dream of brass.
DAWN MOMENTS
David A. Haig
Footsteps echoing in the empty streets,
The solitary roar of one passing car,
The gentle throb of a heart that placid beats
While new light and dawn wind drift far
Over the brick hills and stucco vales
Now hidden in the black anonymity of night.
Venus, wraith like in her beauty, pales
And black hills are purpling in the cloud strewn light.
Look now to the south.
There the bridge in bold relief outlined
Stirs songs in the poets mouth
And plucks the deep recesses of his mind.
There the harbour, frozen by infant light
Conceives reflections of the golden bluing light
Outlines lose their starkness, new day bright,
Plunders a treasure that no wealth can buy.
First feet flutter on the pavements broad!
The sleeping city stirs. Proud ech
oes lose their force.
First trams rolling out a harsh discord!
The crowds are waking: ignorant without remorse
For the beauty bought and broken whilst
A sweaty sickly pallor is settling on the street,
Furnished are the walls which peace and night have swept.
The air is poignant with frustration and defeat.
IN MEMORIAM (to the Golden Cabbage)
Richard Appleton
I’ll tell you,
She was as willing as me,
As warm as the sand
And as soft as the sea,
But things just happened differently.
I’ll tell you,
Only the people we knew
Prevented the two of us
Seeing it through …
I doubt if Odysseus
Would keep face with ease
If he knew distracting bastards like these:
One was pink
Like a beer blotched cupid
And said nothing true
Nor yet appeared stupid,
But teetered word pictures
On the ears of the mob;
He made discrediting motives his job.
And others had Talent, were mystic, were fey,
They spoke of their souls
While they probed for a lay,
But we all were so frightened
By Sigmund Freud’s warning
That we never identified bedmates till morning,
And then those who coupled
Would pledge to be true ----
At least till the next night’s
Drinking was through ----
And she and I
Well it can’t really matter,
But we got confused
By the wine tinged chatter
And woke, re-mated, contentedly,
Surprised at our new partner’s adequacy …
But I’ll tell you,
She was as willing as me.
GARGANTUA’S BIRTHDAY
Julian Woods
Gargantua and Pantagruel were feasting just at dawn,
Ten leagues from Paris on the castle lawn,
They had enormous meats, oxen, gravies, spice,
Heaped casks of beer and French wines cooled in ice.
“My son,’ said great Gargantua, “listen and take note,
This belly stuff is parching and it clogs the throat,
Swill, my boy, swill, and listen to me awhile -----
It is just fifty years to this memorable day,
Since my mother bore me in an immemorial way,
Her overfeasting led to it and I came out
With an afterbirth of earwax and a-crying for some stout.”
“Father, here take this sucking pig and this ripe bowl,
And from me accept what admiration can control,
Take these words of praise, of little or no deceit.”
So saying Pantagruel rose from his seat.
“O son,” the good Gargantua immediately replied,
Here take this bottle and let that speech subside,
I cherish your sentiments but let’s consider done
These ceremonious ways between the father and the son.”
Pantagruel and Gargantua sat all day and feasted on the lawn,
The five oxen eaten but the wine went flowing on,
They talked tales of long ago and high philosophy;
And their expansive wit was all the best of ribaldry,
And the villages all crept as if in fear of prophets and divines
As their belching roared like thunder in the pines.
MATINS
Keith Free
A vision of Crow’s Nest through a blue window
Tepid water on my chest; the early light
Slops yellow puddles on the soapy tiles.
Spiralling down from St. Leonard’s Park
Mixed with the bells of surrounding steeples
Repeating their texts to all Sunday people
Three starlings perch on the backyard fence;
Below my cat gives them a considered glance.
Over the sill a cold breeze slides
A hand of grey marble along my hide
The pinky scent of soap informs me that
I now smell Christian: the cat
Ignores the starlings’ chattering now
In the sooty hazel; lithe clouds blow
Across the pale blue; from below
Fumes of bacon and black coffee grow.
LYRICAL REQUIEM
Marie Kuttna
Silence brings on regrets: it revives
the odd short-circuits of the twisting mind,
its expensive right to screen old memories,
to replay melodies from the singing past;
though each note is a song of loneliness
flicking at the shadow to keep its terrors off,
or a love-song - flesh vibrant, forlorn call
awaiting its echo from a distant wall.
The turning wheels and backward-turning reels
torment consciousness until the curtains fall
in silence, over all …
UNEASINESS
Manfred Mackenzie
Three things that will dispel
The heart from easy vagary -
A narrow line in air
Where not of aircraft was -
On the laming breakage
From an old storm’s dark arteries,
Sight of glance aside a girl
Will hide behind her eye -
O, glories where gods grind us
Which heart denies, till it laugh thrice.
WELTSCHMERZ
Marie Kuttna
To-day seems to have died on our hands -
an uncared for patient, whose early loss
hurts with sheer failure more than all past defeats.
The past - oh, apply that local anaesthetic!
benumbed, to merge with it the history of some world.
Worlds are collapsible gadgets for men who remember,
who play with growing spirals when conviction is gone;
when only our despair echoes through time:
don’t go September! stay with us Spring!
Living is everything.
and by now the present lies dead on our hands.
The Pauline Group, 27 July 1953
EVER AND AGAIN I SEE
Robin Pratt
Ever and again I see
The clock’s face like a lettered moon,
The tired wheel of the traffic slowly turning.
The fountain falling through the rain
Languishes on polished stone.
Long, cold, divided in the air,
The parting moment is apart,
Falls suddenly:
The sum of all these brief goodbyes
Is no small tragedy.
FOR A PHILOSOPHER
Judith Rayner
I have put out antennae from my mind
And my flickers of delicate feeling
Have glided over your brain, touched and twined
About your heart; but my heart was a dreaming
Morning citadel, and my flights of doves
Were lost in the blossom-storm of your thought,
Beating their wings against your learning, loves
Too ancient for their gentleness. They sought
The sunshine; feathers striking colour there
And stirring the steel-crested clouds around,
Circling the black and fainting waters where
The grey dove-like Ophelia thoughts lie drowned
In years; but I do not understand how deep
The waters flow across the thought they keep.
DANAE
Judith Rayner
When I was young I walked in auburn fire,
Flinging a plume of sparks across the light.
Now they have bound my flame within the tower
Of brass, to hide me from the long dark night
Of love. My longing eyes reflect strange thoughts -
Lost purple irises by hidden streams,
There the fawning sunlight slipped and caught
Its dappled greenness where the water gleams.
But they cannot hide me from my lover,
(My precious body, flamed of white and gold)
His fruit-of-Autumn blood will soon discover
My turret flares; and mimic suns enfold
Me in embrace of gold; then let my flame,
My auburn light, curl round the sky again.
I WALKED A-COMPANY WITH CLEAR MORNING
Keith Free
I walked a-company with clear morning
My way high-flung as any kite
And I came in gay serfdom.
Thick channels, alive with intol’rable heat
Loaded me my storm’s deep centre.
You were honey in my blood.
Now, this dry thistle, hard sown in my chest
Tells me the locust hour is raw.
And these dull eyes have rusted.
Now socketless winds, gull-hunted, stony
With cold, saw across my fallow
And this fear-fermenting heart.
SONNET, ON LOVE AS USUAL
Marie Kuttna
Ye Gods! I remember how I asked for love,
Expostulated for it, demanded its delights,
Filed an application in every Heavenly Office
Begging for it, or insisting on my rights …
Yes, I remember how I desired love;
Its intoxication, all its thorns and flowers -
I wished for the heart-ache as well as happiness
To fill my life, or while away long hours …
At last their patience lost, the Administration
Marked my case deserving, and sent me you,
This is how I learnt the lesson about love,
Though at first I was too dazed to know I knew:
And now I can accept with equanimity
The old definition: Just Insanity.
YOU AND I
Marie Kuttna
The air suggests spring … I can feel its softness
drawn intensely by my fingertips
while sounds float in waves over the park
and like trustworthy, faithful old comrades
shine the streetlights.
The breeze brings the scent
of spring - spring invading distant, silent trees;
an empty tramcar has just rattled by
from your direction, and I realize
how much I hoped you would be coming.
You could ring up. And … the evening is so soft,
scented with warmth and starlight; and the noise
of traffic and business rumbles far away.
The streetlights have changed now into magic signals
throwing their shimmer on dark shiny leaves, and I wonder,
whether it was really more lonely in the past
before I met you, and learned the meaning of spring moods
than I am now, waiting for you, perhaps in vain.
MY SISTER KATE
Jeff Miles
Helen was another star who, during the course
of an epic, played to the crowd for a secret siege;
but the boys in the neighbourhood recognized superfluity
in the erotic subtlety of a wooden horse.
Aestheticians all, they find less perfection of form
in a skull staining a silver plate - rather
her emphatic curve of jellied truth, her well-rounded hips;
they lack the consistency of introvert, the Baptist John.
No disciplined thousand crews will she shipwreck, nor
condone the violence of heroic abnegation, for
if harmony is beauty, she is exuberance;
and in the ecstasy of function, we become
the synthesis of king, saint and whore – a universal One
in the unique and seductive nirvana of her shimmying.
THE ROCK
Judy Forsyth
A rock, lonely on a shore’s ruin,
Waits for the return of the sea.
Waits for the swelling tide to overrun
Into the lee.
Once the waters heared about here.
Long waves of shade, breaking in white
Foam on a lichened rock, salty and clear
In the sunlight.
And when the waters rose in storm,
The gulls, driven from a windscoured sky
Came here for refuge, the one stable hour
On which to rely.
But now the sand embeds the rock
On the beach, wind-silted it lies,
Cast-up, while the birds wheel in flight to mock
With raucous cries.
The earth draws the rock to its heart,
And crumbles hard stone to soft sand.
Identity, strength lost, it becomes a part
Of the dry land.
CRIME WITHOUT CRIME
David Haig
Forbidden fruit, contemptuous food
This satisfaction of natural desire,
“Filthy disgusting and rude.”
Sensitive body caught in a mire,
Believing its substitute indecent,
Seeking again its release,
Shame after satiation recent
Hoping for life to cease.
Cooped up, stored up life,
Desire straining again to see,
Yearning, sharp as a knife,
(Oh God! Forgive me!)
Week in and week out,
Bursting forth at last sublime,
Happy, exhilarated, liking to shout,
And the student told - it is slime.
Reasoning plunged into melancholy,
Impulsive, seeming, useless intrigue
A face worried no longer jolly,
A body keyed, seeking fatigue,
A standard demanding curbing. Futility!
The conscience wrongly victorious,
A soul lacking utility,
A fear racked mind, inglorious.
Spinsterhood, symbol of denial,
Limiting man’s power to appreciate bliss,
Life wasted and useless, sterile,
Hard unsympathetic, emotion amiss,
Denying even inconsequential escape
Freedom and life the great outrage!
Perverting till man (self disgusted ape)
And ostracism turns life’s miserable page.
Oh! Let the youth make this appeal:
This sin is not for God to Forgive
But is merely for society to repeal.
The sanctity of womanhood will live,
Youth undenied of hope, now calm
And free of ruinous mental strife,
Using this mental cleansing balm
Again shall have life.
EVENING SONNET
David Haig
I thank the Lord for today;
For sunshine on warm walls;
For haze dulled mountains bathed in light;
The red clouds of evening;
The lone cow, who forlornly calls,
Summoning her child to bay;
For the love that knows no night
But prompts my willing heart to sing.
I ask for her eternal love;
To be her tower of strength
Saved from the passing time;
The power to lift our lives above
The season’s awesome length;
Love, divine, untouched by hollow rhyme
The Pauline Group, 21 September 1953
A VISION
Colin Black
In the moonlight I walked through grey meadows, the night was cold and my heart was dark. And when I came to a willow that lay on a little hill up from the river, I sat myself down upon a rock.
The moon’s bea
ms were soft but cold; the green was turned to grey, the river murmured alien from my ears, for life and the trees were still, but my heart was dark.
I thought not for the moonlight was no place for thought. I sat on the cold hard rock and its immutable chill became part of my being. Memories and sorrows, fair visions, forgotten loveliness approached my consciousness and murmured without. Soft winds stirred the sighing trees, the tiny spirits of the meadow rippled from the willow and the stone. A quivering hush was in the air as if something unknown was near. Unknown to all but me; for I knew who stood behind me, though I made no sound and did not turn my head.
The winds grew calm and stillness reigned more deep than before, and the night was afraid for we stood in the presence of the lady of all things dark. A cloud veiled the face of the moon; there appeared before me the Queen of the Night.
Tall and majestic, darkveiled in robes of black, she said no word, but came to me and her long soft-flowing robes brushed my face; she embraced my neck and held me, and her dark robes enfolded all my soul in touch of silk, and bonds of iron. She clutched my bosom and her long fingers entered my body and fastened about my heart; cold and dread, she touched my lips with a passionless kiss of death and despair.
“Soul of my sorrow, vision of my song of love and death, what will’st thou?”
She rose and held me with one cold hand, veiled in the other sleeve her far off countenance, ever to me blind. With voice of other worlds, of other time, of past existence never told she spoke:
“All things am I unto you; all past desires, all hopes, all memories. I signify the half-forgotten past, and I shall never leave you. Never for the memory of things past abides; these shades shall never vanish, for all your hopes and prayer. I am the soul incarnate of your living being, but I am beyond you. Look and see me what I am.”
She drew close to me, and the veil was lifted from her face. I saw despair and envy, twisted illusions cold and hard; I saw the unhappy child and the rejected youth; old friends I saw and as I looked they laughed in hollow exultation, and I was deceived for they were serpents, Eastern horrors, demons and fantasies of fantastic night; all fears and sorrows then I saw, and visions of the things I held most dear, twisted and broken; the forgotten gown of intellect, the desperate muse of poetry and beauty, both turned from me in scorn, and laughed; nothing remained but cruelty and evil, disillusionment and misery and loneliness; I looked and saw the face of Ann smiling in mockery . . . .
The vision faded and I was alone; and the willow sighed and the night was cold, and my heart is still dark, for the light will never come.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
Manfred Mackenzie
His mind had dreamed with menace
Or lain swilled in brown resenting season;
A rain ran above the making tide
Left heat-smoking the cinder searock.
Confused, his vision rumoured
Outward. The second day he met
At noon envisaged in an orchard
A girl whose body strung without relief.
‘The green hedge violence, spring squirrel
Vines, red earth that shouts a busy fire,
This country holds seared corn that flaps
Like sunflowers, fertile tinder evenings,
A country bridged by vicinal summer
Cyprus-pillared into autumn year.’
These other days he sought with gold-bird wings
The zero holyland of Byzantine,
But too near fell embalmed in enameled sea.
THE YELLOW ROBBERS
Manfred Mackenzie
There being several hills they chose
This olive-grassed, under the low day sweat
Of sun burnished through yellow tragique mask.
O my enemies this unwell hot wind kisses me
Like the Judas, waylain here I could never
Slay it, too visible for accustomed secret foray.
But I would face this slate wind
No eyes’ wind, nor helmet anger, remember
Words, their fixed bitter stubble, bound brain.
Farm and ember. Heavy on the ridge we beat,
Divide like pines. This laboured stake starts hoarse
From furrow, creaking bursts ears, the torqued spirit
Now wait, wait for the rich man at the crossroads.
These nails too have turned wise their eyes
Upon my bones, the other’s grief alloyed with silver
Well, they launched us the soldiery’s
Complacent spear, asses eating nonchalant
Palms, horses lack cries, the dry ruptured cry.
Then up-wind, the urgent words. Drum. What?
O words of high thunder and words of rain.
Their sodden storm of years flashes electric
Deadly down boreal. Do not let them live,
Not till the ceremonial furious Venetian.
[POEM]
Judy Forsyth
Where are your dreams now?
Lost in the sob of yesterday,
Or caught in the twisted strands of future?
Where are your wide eyes
And hands trembling for zeal?
Your thoughts, bright new coins fresh from the mint?
Has your willingness been crushed,
Stuffed back? Or like an eager child
Been shaken into tears with thoughtless reprimand?
Has disillusionment cupped its hands,
And held you like a struggling bee,
Your buzz becoming an unheeded drone?
Has your wide world been narrowed,
Confined in the space of oncoming years?
Professing their knowledge over your youth!
They rule their son’s country.
Over the meal they discuss war,
While war itself gluts on the limbs of youth.
Must we all grow old and wise as this?
I would rather die so young, still dreaming.
Than live to ponder with a head full of grey age.
Give me a brush and I will paint it in the sky,
Daub it in neons thru the cities glare,
Use the newstands as easels for my canvasses,
And watch while the indifferent critics stare.
Give me a pen and I will write it on the water,
Indelible it in ripples of the sea,
Make the waves the turning pages of my book,
And watch while the unheeding ships ignore my plea.
Give me a tune and I will sing it thru the air,
Whistle it along the night-shadowed streets,
Croon it as love song where the lovers walk,
And listen to the echo of unheeding feet.
I will write them, I will tell them, I will sing them
That their world is dead.
They will not read, they will not hear, they will not comprehend
What I have said.
They will only stand and stare, misers all.
Each man shrugging his shoulders at the wind’s sigh.
Each man living within the reach of his own hand.
Each man pulling down the shade to hide the sky.
The apathy, the awful apathy of staring men.
And I? I will go and break my presumptuous pen.
OCCASIONED BY ITEM: CLERGYMEN JUDGING A BEAUTY CONTEST
Keith Free
Adam everyman and lubra eve
Grubbed their brown gods from the soil; felt the
Barbarous earth, and were content only
In the propitious season to conceive.
Mr. Suburban with modern techniques
Drilled deep for sex; tried the elusive key
From door to door; frantic at length must he
Crawl desert paths to kiss their horny feet.
Now Miss Universe, random-choice fella
Sun-bathes beneath a striped beach umbrella;
New mother earth, and his slick mother Olympian
Smiles hugely for
the cameraman.
But dry the eyes. Look! Look! for here we see
New miracles, cheeses-cake orthodoxy.
AUGUST
Endre Ady
translated by Marie Kuttna
Autumn had called on Paris yesterday.
She was gliding along the Rue St. Michel.
waving to leaves and branches on her way
as she met me.
I was on my slow way to the Seine.
Songs, like winter fires were smokily burning
in my mind - little songs about pain,
death, and yearning.
Autumn passed me, and whispered in my ear.
The Rue St. Michel trembled to the sound: -
a few playful leaves, flitting from the branches
danced on the ground.
A second only while Summer hardly halted
and laughingly silently Autumn left Paris.
And I alone had known that she was here
under the trees.
FROM A HAUNTED HOUSE
Judith Rayner
In the lissome rain of the twilight
I have seen boats bear down from light
sad bays to the night,
and in the morning their sound has opened out
in dreams and under closed eyelids.
Morning has always come thus with
translucence slipping through atmosphere;
the moon, dead and blue-veined with memories
of mountains, hanged in taut light in bare
trees. Fears have grown brittle then as fires
closed in the narrow clasp of sunlight.
This safety is only half-down-smoky fading
of clouds, feathered fullnesses of gulls’ breasts
and the water growing pink, flushing
with webbed feet in the depths; then night
returns, through the black hours
rhythmic as scratched design. Our fear
is remembered mist and flickered shadow,
lumped skulls and empty skulls outside the fires
and ghosts are acrid legacies from primitive
minds, gliding surprised in thoughts and sensitive rooms.
TO A CZECHOSLOVAKIAN JEWISH MIGRANT WHO WAS IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP DURING WORLD WAR II
Sue Vacchini
Perfectly your heart’s strength is that tower
brilliant contre la poussiere du monde.
Puissant.
Frail, frail were your bodies beneath war’s brutality
But your minds and hearts were strong
Lighting one to the other a clean power
Above war’s brutality.
And now, towering is your heart
more bright
holding hearts and minds
that men gave you,
their bodies, then, too frail for life.
You keep within you
A rabbi’s last warning blessing
A philosopher’s last thought
and the reality, that your body
was less frail.
And you shall blaze
Against the world’s dust -
That we lean to your clean strength
knowing human to human, all minds and hearts.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sue Vacchini
The old thin nights
sing the winds like a plaintive reed
into my heart,
Discovering its unquiet purple.
O sing me back to the dreaming time
old winds.
Back to the Dreaming, Dreaming time
When my heart was clear and still,
When the air was silent …
For now the air is tossed, wandering,
Searching the Quiet that is lost,
Crying among the lurching trees,
For the Quiet;
Making a restive purple of their hearts.
Once I glimpsed the Dreaming in the sun,
Silently,
Silently caught the green moment,
And then
My heart knew such a stillness
That the restive purple
Faded –
In the green moment.
O but the bleak winds come
Scattering the green-time dreaming
Whirling me into the night again,
For that,
That which the trees and I and the winds
Can never find.
The Pauline Group, April 1955
FEED THEM THAT FALL FROM THE TABLE
Barrie? Gillman (B.W.F.G.)
“Twenty one years …
Yes, twenty one years in a pinewood casket …
Of my own particular design and selection
_________________
“Twenty one times round the year.
Too little time, yes too little time
For recognition …
_________________
“Soon the mating season …
Life’s own reason
For duration
On this pottled earth …
_________________
“Kindly ascribe my success to,
Licentious living …
And an overabundance,
Of would be spite …
__________________
“Come and join me, in the sweet balloon of nature,
And say that I loved this life fro greater reason,
Than I would suppose …
__________________
“Remember you seek life as you expected liberty.”
__________________
Moderation and existence,
Maximation and ultimation,
Co-existence …”
__________________
“Wonders and mysterious ways,
Solve …
And with solution …
Grasp realization …
___________________
“Brotherhood of elements
Controlled supposition …
____________________
“Speak upwards for the inclination,
Is steep … And the way is of your life …
____________________
“Trust men as you would deceive your maker”.
The Pauline Group, 15 June 1955
[POEM]
Jerry Nelson
O we have shattered the gift we found
And turned to the love of ash. The grave
Has bound us round. What can be saved
In the hollow breast of the grave? We’re bound
In the ash of flesh, and the rose of pain
Has blinded our hearts more than flame
Could blind. O bind us Christ in thorns
Again, when the heat of the heart that breaks
In the ash, in the night, in the ground, is drawn
To Him whose heart is fire and sweet,
Whose heart in the rose of blood is bound.
Come with the trumpet, Christ with the clash
Of cymbals, come to the world of ash.
THE COAST
John K. McLaughlin
Frost-white clouds in a sky of blue,
While waves of green fall on the shore,
And farther out the breakers roar,
Where the sea takes on a lighter hue.
Rose-red cliffs near a golden beach;
With flecks of fire the sea is lit,
On the horizon the red sun split,
As it slowly passes from our reach.
The sky is dusted with silver stars,
And above the black and silent shores
Hangs pale the crescent moon, which pours
A misty light on sandy bars.
A SHELTER
Manfred MacKenzie
What jumped queasily in my blood
What thin fire upon the spines of trees
Signed of multiplicity of cloud
Come quick upon no ordinary breeze?
Those mauve lightnings splayed aloud
So livid quiet another might not hear
Beneath blood (quiet as bone-white) so high and wide
So strut, tower, flag or poplar did not bear
What willed then from that bland air;
Then rain began on distant capes
And broke on all of that geography;
But I have seen as it rolls and leaps.
Rain fume of warship-bowed its masts ever
Sealed in that imperilling fire, marauder
Of my no man issued no man’s weather.
And I who had been the thunder’s boarder.
Those contrived of wind and water times
I count on fingers now, and from this shed
Of ordinary brick where bodies give me room like rhymes
I watch afar the wry small lightnings where they led.
ALL THE GRAPHITIC MESS
Julian Woods
All the graphitic mess of men and engines,
All the rasps of speech like unechoing iron,
The frictive discords and bellow of combustion
Are tucked away under Paddington and Glebe.
And it is quiet with evergreens on the calm lawns,
Qualmless streetlights, and confident purring taxis,
Blinking round the avenues, lilting on springs
And all soft, all hush, the couples come out.
Under the bawdy moon goat-men still gambol
And the mystic howls, north of the harbour,
The ecstasy, the moment of perfect faith
Over the first ceremonious sherry in the lounge.
Lifted up, the crushed peasant with his mountain barley
Hand reaped in the rheumatic wind, the gift
To the unsuperstitious prayer has been granted;
Ah, Newton, you have roofed us from disconsolations
Of the cold vacuums between the tiny stars
Why have I felt my terror between dead houses
And the clean swept streets, the fence that doesn’t rock
With a face over a hedge in a startled silence?
In the Riverina scrub it isn’t more lonely,
When it’s so quiet you fear someone is just about to speak
Stepping out of the leaves, talking in a loud voice
In the afternoon hours of the omniscient watching fox.
Where will we hide when the burning bowels of history
Erupt, and the world flexes its red arms?
In the bitter periods, or where the raw tranquility?
Ah, we are gods leaning back out of life and time.
Yet kept busy by the rip of Progress. My house
Much of my property are out of date, seven
Remarkable inventions since Christmas all
For household application have kept me diligent.
And all my days are dreams of evenness,
Love quiet, home comforts, pretty little wife,
Two children planned cautiously between pay rises
On anxious midnights of unstoppered fertility.
Born, and goosefleshed by the stimulant air,
Re-enwombed and intended for sleep,
Uneasy hints of a tearing birth but blessed
Into blindness before they fear the dark.
MY LOVE MUST FALL TO GRIEF
Jerry Nelson
My love must fall to grief. She understands
The rose shall burn to ash in furnace heat
And I shall lurch alone in Savage lands
And curse the sightless power that turned my feet
Away. Yet I must turn to darker wine
Than wine-deep eyes and wander stranger streets
In stranger lands with darker nights than mine,
And eat a bitter bread of bitter wheat,
And I must kiss untender cheeks and lips.
This burning burden bares me slender down
And grief has wrecked a thousand fragrant ships.
EPITAPH FOR A WALK
Mari Kuttna
All life is useless … only in raw clay
can questioned meanings remain unresolved.
The looping pale clouds will perhaps release
the earthy undulation of today and yesterday;
The mauve woodsmoke, the evening-scented sky,
rescue me from my own hearing and sight,
turn me from the point of my own return:
from a voice that falls softly from twilight at sea,
and the unquestioning glance of an eye.
Not the single notes, but the theme in a fugue
can drown this sense of endless nonarrivals,
save me from the slowly-tightening loop
of a voice that rustles like leaves on dry grass,
and its undulation through the salt air at night.
HUMPTY-DUMPTY
John Croyston
Humpy-Dumpty sits on a window sill
the air of eyes droughting round his
merged head: soldiers lay leaves
for his Columbus crushed solution
on the thumbs down Gladitorial ground.
That the sailors were as soft as the sea
And the sea tear-wet and warm
He’d sat, noisily, wrapped in newsprint,
(some pasted on the pane) saying, “What a good egg am I,”
and while his hen claimed precedence in the yard
a wolf damaged a flower, and all the falling leaves
couldn’t keep Humpty from falling.
That the laurels were loud in the wind
And the wind without a storm.
Winter and the heaven petals bone the boughs
and hide the house, and silence moves on the house
the dove-white yard and the laurel tree.
The cygnet moves, and cracks the stillness
A dove hears snows are in the sun
And the Ark is of an acorn.
MICE
Julian Woods
A mouse is a beautiful and intricate creature
Observing one on the stove in search of food,
The features seemed so precise and alive,
That his smallness appeared only concentration,
And our fear of mice I thought
Stems from this keen tinyness.
But not only this. Seeing one on the floor
It was evident why women panic and call for help.
Mice do not run directly away from you
They merely canter across the floor at an odd angle,
As though escaping in a different medium altogether.
And that whisper of hurrying feet
And low carried head, can hardly be called escaping
For it gives the impression
That at any moment the mouse will accomplish
An Einstein space-time curve
And suddenly confront him on even terms.
A WOODCUT FOR CEZANNE
Manfred Mackenzie
He was of a hardy mind
Who touched in fruits beneath the rind
But whose transgression was not to see
Beyond the fruit of the apple tree.
I do not think, for instance, that in pears
He felt that jealous prudent seed that’s theirs.
Yet we know the apple is more primary
Though in his kind of conservatory
I cannot think that the natural sun
Quibbled much over either one.
THE BEGGARS
Judith Rayner
As beggars before the autumnal town
With its last strained beauty of taut tall trees,
Who left their summer’s fields, coming down
From trembling, spun stallion, mist on muscle
Hills, finding under seamould plated spires
Empty streets and sleep bedraggled birds,
Are those who seek within their restless hours
To touch another’s mind with patient words.
Not so friendless the stranger in fin
e cities
As those who in sole thought may penetrate
Perceiving alone; and no one pities,
With the radiance of some welcome state,
(Neither church nor charitable women,)
When their loneliness overwhelms them.
LINES FROM MACEDON
Marie Kuttna
If destiny is the strength of our desires
years abstract the power from the dynamos of fate.
The art of winning, in art and other matters,
comes with some practice. I came and saw
but conquest unrolls no worlds for new possession
no, I can only turn to sack the towns
I held before. So I remain
in control of many a field of skirmish
but fight decisive battles all alone,
myself against myself, once again.
O god of dreams, grant me a new desire!
the ones I had have fallen by the way.
LIBRARY
John Croyston
In the evening he reads dreams
hour housed and roof-warmed
in the long room. He blinked tired years
from his quiet eyes.
There is none to fill his fingers
or his slippers, or tie knots in his life.
none to spin morning on a cup of tea
or feel time on the seconds of his pulse.
There is no time. Living is a timeless
change of place and oscillation of crowds;
and dying is the way he lives,
and the colourless ache of autumn.
So he comes with fumbling feet
blackened against the cold,
his aspen hands floundering on a table
his head on a book reading dreams.
THE BARGAIN
Manfred MacKenzie
Times after I thought those same words spent
On early articles I know never bought
Were words gone. Re-encountering them
I see that wary fruit that’s something man instead
Was bought and ask, is there not wondering.
Which time to thought it would be demanded why
I did not give to rare trade a name
Of better grace. If what punished much ago
Began than its more fatal altered way
I have praised now that so courteous dawn.
ON THE BEACH
Keith Free
As molluscs, prone on bearded shelves
From globeringal ooze secrete their pearls,
So this morning in my mind seems
To form the lattice of a crystal scene,
A precarious dazzling tissue that holds
The sand, the bay, and our outstretched selves
In diamond that is never old.
As molluscs gird their blueish valves
With horny chambers for their tendril souls,
Our added pleasure, from this means
That all our pleasures that have been
Are helmet linings for our tender skulls.
As marble artifacts sunk in a marsh
Crust with chalk and lose their chiseled life
So months will coat this sand and sun, the past
(Excepting the interior crystallites).
MY LOVE MUST GRIEVE
Jerry Nelson
My love must grieve in distant lands
For Christ has claimed my heart and hands,
And wretched I in sorrow leaving
Have lost my heart in time for grieving,
And I in hiding cannot hide
From their blameless bleeding
Nor from the ceaseless rushing tide
Of hopeless voices crying
In their wizened needing.
Their mouth unfed, the living dying
O land of fire
O night of tears
O day of sighing.
FREUDIAN IN THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS
Keith Free
The sun, through red cirrus and strata of pall
Sinks into black Botany’s factory rim.
Of Plato’s Eternal, he was the mighty symbol
And poets thought its sapience shone thro’ them.
He acquired a myriad fiery names
And poets were his phantom instruments
Till, grappling with the richer idioms
In their daementia, the word became the sun.
But in a different garden I have daily wrought
Scorn those projections of unhealthy sap
Know that the muse is refleshed thought,
Infant echoes from the mother’s lap,
Know that the roses in the brain
Are rooted in the crippled loins,
Know that living, like night’s subversive bands
Infiltrates our mental states
Now block by block, its crowds expand
A dark bile through my glands
As workmen pour from factory gates.
And in a disease of brownish gold
The shrivelled sun slips
Away before invasion
Then clouds swarm down like negro lips
The dark! The dark! The dark has won!
Now left, now right
Form and figure, one by one
Unform into the normal night
I stand still in the darkening street
My stupor culls me from the world
The skin of my body is a papery grey
My brains golden abscess drains quite away
O my sicklie soul! Looke to me!
Is this the Vision, the Triumph?
AT THIS TIME
Dick Appleton
III
Nipples expectant
And white thighs writhing …
And after said time
The birth-puckered crying,
From these
(failing tablets)
The music receding,
From these,
Kin to sea-snail,
Our essence of being.
Choice of Nirvana, Dioce,
Or a neither, new, but Human,
A life that thrives on living,
(with regrets to Cardinal Newman)
Sharply
Like bars silhouetted,
Smoothly
On seas over-mastered,
To stalk the streets
Outstare the signs,
Though the axe falls after …
(the sea-snail shrinks
from the dark-cut shadow,
our minds, our essence,
might flinch so tomorrow)
Mind lurches,
Jerks the time-wheel on;
Time falters
When its hub is gone.
ZIG-ZAG
John Greenstone (sic)
The zig-zag dreams
Blaze in various states of disrepair,
The fierceness of imitators, the corruptible goodwill,
Time-heaves, owl-echoes, syllables of smoke
Understandably.
In the plastic citadels of despair
Board is free but souls are thallium
In some attic poetlings brew coffee
As warrior of something or other, no matter.
He can be thankful for the little things of life.
What is the word to use? Now that
The H-bomb has been invented in bedrooms
A pink gust of powder.
What irony! Dance the square dance,
Quote the sporting advertisement
Rather then weep over tissue paper
Yet it seems to us that must die
And go into the grave that we
Hugging a pair of friable thighs
What the old solid edifices teach;
Drum-gray, tear shaking humiliations.
LA COMEDIE HUMAINE
Richard Appleton
Sauce for Saints and sauce for Sinners
Spices for Honore’s dinners,
Saints shall thrive in ordered bliss,
Sinners thrive on something ‘less’:
These will sculpture life to patterns
And sip ‘X’ beers to every pay,
Those will bed them down with slatterns
And guzzle claret when they may;
These will weep at planned-for sorrows
And shoulder griefs with tautened lip,
Those, feel fear for all their morrows,
Fore-seeing soon the Final Slip;
These will age with querulous yearning
Begging smiles for gifts they’ve strewn,
Those will wake to blear-eyed mornings
Wake to fear they’ve always known.
Gall for Saints and gall for Sinners
Victuals at the Devil’s dinners,
Saints shall die in beds of pain,
Sinners sharply die ……Again.
MY DECEIT
Terry Driscoll
Beyond the wharf
grey rocks, bone smooth
reject the speckled waters,
and from the hill
reflections
polish their shadows
on debris
on the water’s edge.
The street carries wind
along the fences,
fences that line
an infinity of footpaths
as they frame a gathering
of empty trees.
And from the road beyond,
Her voice beckons,
beckons from the street of Sirens
from the highway
of my deceit.
The Pauline Group, no date
KREMLIN COLD
John Croyston
Kremlin cold
and Pentagon pride
these are the reasons
why Henry died.
He poor chap
is the helled word
“Christ”, or the cry
of Angels to their God;
he is the blood
that washed the lamb
and he is the blood
that left the lamb;
he is the sword
and he is the hand
and he is the flesh
and the matted sand
And Henry is you
and Henry is I
and his mouth is sweet
with his own soft eye.
THE HARE
Julian Woods
We saw a hare travelling across country
Between houses by the open pasture,
Gambolling, loping, taking his time,
In full daylight, ruffled by the winter wind.
The creature’s vision of things struck us.
He noted, he avoided, he was careful,
We were just conditions of his purpose
As one of the professionals he went nonchalantly by.
He paused at the metal road for a moment
Ears straight with energy, back curved like a spring,
Over the road he went, an important traveller,
With something surely there at his destination.
FLIGHT OF THE QUEEN ANTS
Julian Woods
Out of the gloomed air
And the wind’s torrent
The ants came scattering,
Whirled in their mad millions.
They flew and settled,
And deftly laid their gauze wings down,
And their bodies twisted away
Frantic with desire.
THE SEAGULLS
Julian Woods
On the windy straits
To the steamer’s horn
The seagulls are skimming
The flying foam.
Windy circles
And three-pronged feet
Passing the bay
Where the white waves beat.
Admirals, sailors,
Leathery fishermen
Sink down in the sea
Where the gulls can’t get them.
Ignorant tourists
Throw over crumbs,
They pick the offerings
Of all foreign lands.
The bell, the buoy
And the lighthouse tower
Send to the sailors
Hour upon hour
The menace of water,
The drift of the tide,
Anxiety in storm
If the shoal is wide.
While the gulls play wide
On the ragged seas,
Windy particles
Of the Antipodes.
MEETINGS
Keith Free
A few minutes either way was sufficient
But the hero’s flaw, the gypsy’s curse is coincidence
Approaching here, book under arm, a man in the street
Now recognized as an acquaintance; and you meet.
Confusedly at the intersection I become
Step out of the moving photograph and doff
The everyday magic cloak; safe through the world of dwarfs
Now defined as he thinks I am.
For he is the poisonous spy, the unrevealed birth mark;
You are forced to see the fact of aimlessness
And that, as each fumbles with the immediate past
That all only know anyone more or less,
Some feel this more poignantly than I did, ever,
Talk on anything; produce the detaining cigarette
Till suddenly the definition is a stranger ……
Especially at night, when the city only has a railway voice,
And a sole survivor, you follow the tram lines home;
From the tunnel of your introspection you run into someone
Stand for awhile, or have coffee in a smoky shop
And reading between the lines of the conversation
You both squat at the entrances of your caves of gloom
Appalled at the pattern, and the metropolitan rite
Of half knowing many people; ushered thro’ the showroom
Then exit on the footpath - So long - Good night.
The Pauline Group, no date 1955
THE RAT
Colin Black
I read of a rat entering a child’s bedroom
In Redfern, and pictured the creature’s progress
Coming in stealthily, smelling, surveying,
His way, then purposefully up the bedpost.
The exploit, the fertility of the thing struck me,
The beast’s assurance and calculation:
His brown-bigness passing for a cat’s size,
The subtle directness of his deceit.
He walks with purpose up the body
Beneath the blankets, which wakes up,
Sees only the familiar cat beside him
Crawling up his neck, but is mistaken.
DIRGE FOR NOVICES
Julian Woods
Timidly, with some fear and wavering,
Adventuring with others of a kind
To be within the self an unreflecting king
Leaving the days of vassalage behind.
To reach more than a vacant isolation,
But a real lion quality sheathing its own claws,
If only a roaring silhouette on the barren horizon
It will concern the myriads, make them pause.
And then when age old aches grow strong
To work out through the nostrils even pity
In strictly personal answers, and before very long
It will be the outline for a mighty city.
The chorus for such a fancy has long been sniggering,
The frill-neck lizard, rock like and proud
Stiffly erect will defy the most powerful thing,
Yet looks ridiculous before the jaws of the mongrel crowd.
And let us take for ourselves this sign
That a true peace comes and tyranny relents,
Two drunken envoys toasting as they dine,
It’s friendship at la
st between two continents.
REMONSTRATION
Richard Appleton
Certain poets who should know better,
Have bid me mind my subject matter,
Supposing - and they do no doubt -
My words might twist my brains about;
But matter, words, or other media
Are slaves …
To onomatopoeia.
LAMENT FOR THE CORRUPTION OF NOBLE QUALITIES
Jeremy Nelson
The hawk has fallen,
Wounded from flight
To a desert of frost and fire.
He has cracked in the cold of the night
The flint of his carnal desire,
The arrow of rage
Has hunted with iron the stone of his heart
In the height of his craving years:
The years that he hunted for power alone,
Still the rat was careless in mocking his fears
While the heart of the hawk had flown.
[POEM]
Julian Woods
The ragings of ravishing time,
The unspent hunger of insensible time,
The aspects of decay, the roars of death,
Volleys, shots, and curses flying,
Crusts and shells and skeletons,
Their charges scooped away.
One of its relics whimpers around us,
Crying for an old glory.
Something gone and descended into the dust
Stirs and sings in the shadows,
Grinning skull of Christ
And cross-bones stretched on high
Beckon the living to the dead
And death has a double victory
For it is so easy to go,
A much easier thing to do
Than leave heroic relics of your own.
The Pauline Group, September 1955
“NIGHT SOUNDS AND REALIZATIONS ………”
Barrie (?) Gillman. (B.W.F.G.)
Standing on the underbrush
Of deferential underlip
Listening to the awesome silence
am I …
Endeavouring to discover why
The sounds that thrive in the
encompassing quiet …
Are not visible tonight ……
Picture me …
Trying hard to capture
the invisible unsung songs
As warm and various as love
The wild lyrics
of whispering nature ……
The virtuous white dove
That exists in my slumbering
drugged breast,
Thrives on me …
the
pillow
pain
and
jealousy
At its own request
More fool I
For seeking out the judge of consciousness ……
Reprieved from the guilt
of young ideals
I am the spirit sponsor
Who takes kinship
With the credulous sons
Of human decency …
Now,
I ask myself … ring out the night sounds
with all available clarity ……
I am burning candles
Tall and stutter faultless
To a higher hero beacon
of illogical warning
known love …
And ghettos of sanely
incremental duress flicker plainly ……
Don’t …
Try and claim the national sounds
of darkness,
Nor …
Endeavour to attain the bouncing
mirror moon
For the most relaxed of noble words
I found with surprise
Is hidden in your sparkling eyes
And …
Is called life ………………
“HOMINO, HOMO, LUPUS ……TCH, TCH …MAN”
Barrie (?) Gillman (B.W.F.G.)
Sunday living
Sweetly sighing
Creptoc …
Ribjoint …
Paris, New Jersey ……
People crawling
Babes in harm
Cheapskate,
Elusive,
Green cod …
Abusive
Man among the elephants ……
Day of God
and
salted cod
Cars
and
Bars
and
Etruscan art ………
Buck eyes
White skin
Fleecy lawns
Wide striped
‘lescents,
Bearing within
Their Sunday presence
Hatred
and
Gin …………
Street curbed desire
High corner
Slats
and
Tats
Fish love eyes
Braids
and
Jades
Integrated surprise ………
Pleasant
soft
hell,
The old church
wrinkled warden,
possessed
of
a
hard bell
Verdent vibrations
in
the
air
Scale and zebras
The running stations
My Aunt Agatha
Black lace
Tinselled
voice
Hypocritical face
What
a
way
To incline a head …………
Terra cotta
and
me
Canvas hammocks
the
young
oak
tree
magnificent
repressions
the
little
bitch
across
the
avenue
Life is bloody ………
Shetland ‘overs
village
concerts
hardware
stores
and
family
bores
interstellar
intuition
I
will be
the
last
person
to
go
to
the
moon amen, vale, tch, redic …
My
name
is
black
opposed
to
royal
and
yellow
is
not
even
a
colour
besides
olive
is
grained
with
J.C.’s
contusions
This is he never live but let alone ………
“PLACID CONCEPTIONS AND I ………”
Barrie (?) Gillman (B.W.F.G.)
I am so
terribly impatient
Like a confidential register
Speed through inarticulate ideas
(Been doing it for years)
Making horrible decisions
Beating my head
on a literary banister
Having the darned poetic
premonitions …………
Hear this …
from a friend, the popular trend
(about me)
“Wonderful chap
quite a fertile
imaginative brain
But … every time he
writes or plays … I’m
positive he does it
in a daze ……
(Doesn’t quite k
now
what he’s doing or saying) ……
Ah yes …
The gropers
(Like me)
Must endeavour
to live wisely … and see
(and hear)
All that is to be seen
(and heard)
Like music … the chime
(and rhyme)
That is …
Of the herd ……………
It’s rather odd you know
But …
(Disregard the grimace on my face)
every time I look
backwards over my right shoulder
I seem …
to fall naturally into place …
_____Retrogression?? ………
Par example …
I am an elegant Viennese bakery
Which churns out …
(delicately)
Much mocha cake,
For Dorothy and …
Out of Towners …
Yes,
Just for their sake
I am in existence …………
I am inclined
rather to overemphasise,
The natural alien tidbits
Like stepped down, swept up
colour
and noncommittal composition …………
I remember
yes I recall
Whilst as a paying member
Of the …:
“Philosophical Excursions Association”
I was rapped on the back by a rather
enormous apparition,
Namely …
“Dorothy in the shape of a cylindrical gas tank”
I attach importance to this trifle
Because I seem to realize,
That it signifies something
If … not all,
Like corduroyed beplaided bibbies,
And,
A brightly painted
rubber ball …………
The only thing at present
I can visualize … those two
ruby pendants …
dangling from the jades immortal
eyes …
And yogis shrieking to the skies
Whilst hanging from the ceiling
by
chancy
woven
must
have
absolute
faith
ties …………
I wonder
if life means as much
to you
Or rather means anything
…… at all
… Cheers!!!