Election Day 2013

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On election day we went to the local school
To cast our ballot, to teach our children.
I struggled
To overcome the temptation
The upwelling urge to draw
A large cock and balls
Across the ballot paper
Or to scrawl Proletarian Democracy
In bold proud letters. Normalised
I voted. Formally and correctly.

And after we stood in the warming
Sunlight of the later morning
And chatted with neighbours
As kids kicked a ball round oval
And sausage sizzle aroma
Of caramelising onions
And public school desperation
For funds, overwhelmed us
And we, to aid the school.
Bought sausage and chicken
Kebab, one each and a cup of tea.

And we sat and ate and chewed
I mulled and thought. How appropriate!
Thin lifeless white bread,
Like the bulk of candidates.
And thin lifeless sausages
Ground snips and snails
Puppy dog tails. Or Bismark misquoted
If you like laws and sausages,
You should never watch either one being made.

shadows and sighs

Long streaks of early morning shadows
Fall right to left across the paddocks
And they shrink each time I turn my head
To look out the window, clear and windy.
Overnight the wind howled and groaned.
And I thought, no one happy until death
Can the dead be happy? And then my son
Said, be careful for what you wish for.
What? I was just thinking, well I thought
About spiders and they are creepy
And then I thought about this cartoon
And it is a bit creepy,
And the moral of the cartoon is
Be careful for what you wish for

And I was reading from the Oxford
Illustrated History of Greece
And the Hellenic World.

Child? Why do you cry?
Why is your heart so full of grief?
Speak now! Do not conceal!
These things in fact came from Zeus,
After you prayed.
Arms outstretched.
Palms up supplication.
You prayed all the sons of the Achaeans
To be hard pressed, huddling sterns of ships.
Wanting for you, suffering shamefully.

With deep sighs and groans swift footed Achilleus spoke
O my mother, all these things have been granted of Zeus;
But what pleasure is there now that my love has died?

Barking and Nothingness

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One day last week I had to drive into town and pick up my wife from
her work. I was listening to Radio National, and as usual I was
subjected to the views of some sort of a political pundit. I was a bit
surprised when the pundits were happy to call themselves cynical. This
got me thinking and looking stuff up, both on the internet, and also
using something rather old fashioned called books.

Normally one would write this sort of an essay using a historical
method, that is one would start off from the origins of the words and
concepts and then move to the present. Instead I want to turn things
over and look at the current idea of Cynicism first. In the dictionary
I consulted, it defined Cynicism as misanthropy, that is a hatred for
humanity. This can be accepted without too much controversy. The
dictionary had a second definition which may cause more interest. A
Cynic is one who thinks that all human activity is based on self
interest. The point that I found interesting in this definition is the
fact that it is a commonplace thought that we are all self
interested. Indeed this is the philosophical underpinning of all
market economies. It is the basis of our modern world, all our rights
and our legal framework are based on this idea of self interest. So
when a person calls themselves a Cynic and then says his or her
opponent is only acting on self interest, how can this even be a
critique in a market based economy?

Of course it can not be, unless of course one is making their critique
from a left wing position. By left wing I mean a position that holds
that if all things are created socially they must be appropriated
socially. It would be more instructive, and maybe even closer to the
truth to say that the modern Cynic is in fact no more than a
nihilist. Our modern Cynics would say, for example, that the big banks
and corporations are all greedy bastards who are out to get us, and
steal our money. Sadly our modern Cynics also see to sya that if
someone tries to protest against this exploitation, for example, as the
occupy movement has tried, then the Cynic will in all likelihood brand
them lazy lay-about hippies who just want a hand out. So you can
easily see that this sort of Cynicism leads us into a position where
we are unable to act, as all action is futile and self centered. In a
word nihilism.

So if our modern Cynics are in fact nihilists, what is a 'true'
Cynic. As Plato would say a Cynic is Socrates gone mad. Some
commentators note that Jesus was a type of Cynic, I am not able to
comment on this point, but I happy to point out the relationship
between the Cynics and the early monastic movement.

Cynicism is an old movement, which did have a basis in the philosophy
of Socrates. More than a sect it was a way of life, a mode of thinking
and acting. There are various arguments as to the origin of the name
Cynic, but all the various view points agree that the term comes from
the Greek word for dog (kuon). Some would say that it is simply that
they met in at an Athenian gymnasium called the White Dog Gymnasium,
in a similar way to the Stoics were given their name from the
colonnaded building where they used to teach. Others say that it is
because a dog will guard his or her home with all their ability, in
this case the idea is that Cynics closely guarded their ideas, and
their program. My personal opinion is that the name comes from the
idea that the dog is the most shameless of the animals. The dog will
go anywhere, eat anything, have relations in the street and
more. Seeing how the original Cynics lived rough it is easy to see the
relation to dogs and Cynics.

So let us return to the contrast with Cynics as a movement, and the so
called cynics who dominate our present mutual discourse. Cynicism for
the ancients was informed by two quotes from the Delphic Oracle. Know
Thyself, and Debase the Current. There is some argument over what was
meant by Know Thyself (gnothi seauton). Some commentators would say
that it meant to know your place in the face of the Apollonian oracle,
I reject this idea. The verb gnothi for the Greeks as well meant to
have sexual relations, in the way that we say that a if person knew
someone carnally, we would say know them in the Biblical sense. So the
oracle could be telling people to 'F*** themselves.' Amusing as this
idea is, I think we can safely reject it as well. Which leaves us with
the simple injunction (for the form of the verb is the aorist
imperative) to have knowledge of yourself, to be self aware. Or as a
Marxist would say self consciousness.

The other important phrase is the idea of 'debasing the currency.'
Poor Diogenes took this too literally and did in face debase the
currency (mixed another metal in with the silver used for making
coins.) This caused him to have to flee his home town of Sinope. This
can also be seen to mean debase the current. To; as Nietzsche would say,
revalue all values. This can mean little else than to look at all the
current socially accepted values, and then try to understand them, and
overturn them if required. This is NOT what most of the current cynics
attempt to do.

A third major idea of the Cynics is the idea of being
cosmopolitan. Where in our current multicultural society this may seem
like a trite truism, but for the Ancients to leave one's city meant to
loss citizenship, the ability to take part in political life, and
meant that certain roles and jobs were not available to such a
person. To be a citizen of the world in ancient Greece was to make
oneself an outsider.

In our day when the pundits we see on television or hear on the radio,
who have a career earning good money, who have the ability to persuade
many people, call themselves Cynical, we can rightly call them as no
more than liars. While I am happy to see words change over the years,
as this represents the genius of a people, and the flexibility of
human thought, there are times when we have to nail certain definitions
to certain words to allow us to communicate properly. When there are
perfectly good words to describe the jaded nihilistic speech of our
moulders of ideology, why make up a word when one has no idea of what
they are talking about. To me this sort of caper does nothing but
muddy the waters, and gives trite ideas a fabulous dress which it has
no right in wearing.

So what should we mean by Cynicism? A Cynic is a person who is able to
look at themselves, and the world around them, and to see that so much
of it is a failure and a confidence trick. A Cynic is a person who
rejects the goods and wealth of society, who attacks the accepted
norms of that society. A person who understands that they are a
citizen of the world. A Cynic is not a person who uses glib sarcasm,
not one who accepts the general malaise of the bought and sold media
to make smug comments which do not extend our knowledge, but only
cause more despair by pandering to the lowest common denominator. A
Cynic is not someone who parrots falsehoods in a attempt to pander to
wealth and to promote their own career. This sort of person is no more
than a bourgeois nihilist, and should be called such.

Book Launch - Margate Train

IP and the Train

Typical treacherous Hobart weather. Up with the rosy dawn clear and cloudless. The radar map showing a thin weak cold front moving across the state, west to east. The funny little book shop Freight Train Books on the Margate Train ran it's first event, a reading by three authors from Interactive Publications. David Rieter, Lyn Reeves & Anne Morgan.

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David chats with local art lover

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Each of the authors has recently published a book. David began the reading from his novel "Primary Instinct", a slice of life, fly on the wall series of satirical nuggets diarising and lampooning the educational system. With the problems of literacy in Australia and Tasmania in particular this is a timely nudging us into the serious debate which we desperately need. Not the periodic moral panic which masquerades as debate we usually have in this country. Rather a serious adult conversation on how this country (indeed all the Anglosphere) can reverse our current slide into irrational stupor. A debate as to how we can use education as an opportunity not just to create narrowly focused experts, but one in which children can be inoculated with the spirits of curiosity and imagination. Skills that will allow them to still be expanding their knowledge of themselves and the world well into their old age. The end of labour, to paraphrase Aristotle is to gain leisure and goal of education is to teach us how to best use our leisure.

And then from the third in his junior fiction series Project Earth-Mend. As if on cue wild wind and squalls raced down the mountains, horizontal across the wide brown-eyed cow paddock. And the site was lashed with a short sharp rain shower.

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Ann Morgan reads from The Sky Dreamer

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Glasses of wine on offer and local cheese and a score or so of children. Next Anne Morgan read "The Sky Dreamer", her moving children's story about the young boy Liam and his struggles after losing his big sister. Lovingly illustrated by Céline Eimann, and honestly written by Anne this little book should be in every school library and in as many houses with children as possible. Learning needs to be more than simply building a workforce as we move into a more technical economy. Education needs to be about how to deal with life and loss and sorrow. More than just school, more than the family. The social production of the individual. This aspect of education as something more than the three R's is behind Aristotle's statement that neglect of education does harm to the constitution.

Simple things sometimes move me, the simple sight of the young children listening to the author reading from her work, while the younger ones played game games as little ones will. I thought about all the tales and stories and life lessons spoken taught down the generations unrolling deep into the past in and around this small community. This tiny bay of meeting sea and land. Intermittent afternoon around and the mountains, darkened with mist with the rain clouds, hurl gloomy clouds and glaring winds. And I went a couple of days later, with the children, to the museum. And we stood silent, sad, scared in the exhibiting convict days gallery, and saw the displays of chains and whips and uniforms and all that went with the transportation times. I thought about the generations, about all the tales told in languages now lost. Then Anne reads her story and the children look and listen.

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Lyn Reeves captivates the little ones.

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Lyn Reeves tailored her reading from her recent work "designs on the body" for the large number of children around. And offered up her well moulded poems with rhythms like the squally afternoon, where the fast moving clouds race and the shadow retreats across the wide eyed cow paddock, flooding the wet grass with the energy and light of the sun, dancing and sparkling off countless raindrops on countless blades of swaying in the wind grass. Lyn read of dogs with funny names and of wing drying cormorants and of bathing her infant son. From "Primal Sense"

                         Vertebrae ripple
beneath my hands like birdsong.

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For the hungry artists.

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Books for children, and books about teachers and books by teachers and the opportunity to speak and talk, and for the children to be given the chance to grow and learn and listen. Both physical and mental there is very little more important than the education of children, so much so I can easily agree with Aristotle when he writes "Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well." Hopefully the parents will also be strong teachers for their children, this would of course be the best situation. And of course a time for chatting and for discussing the works presented. A glass of red and some art and cheese and fruit all on a squally typically treacherous Tasmanian Sunday.

Tragedy

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English teachers that speak of 'rashness' as being the tragic flaw of Oedipus are just plain silly. I have been thinking about things, as I shovel about this coyle. I have been thinking of questions around tragedy. What is tragedy and what is the tragic? I have been forced to use, as a starting point, the fragments I can remember from high school English class. Many thoughts and points are able to be brought to the fore, to be garnished and gnawed upon. Spat out or savoured in turn. All this thinking and all these thoughts have been aided by my special circumstances. Working in a used book store gives me access to a great many interesting books, and also allows enough slow times for me to be able to read some of these books. More importantly working in a book store allows me to amuse myself with the idea of being a 'cultural worker'. A role I am sad to say is the closest I can get to calling myself qualified to make any sort of comment about the nature of tragedy being not a flaw, not a character breach or defect, but rather a manifestation of the ignorance that forms the scaffolding of everyday life.

The high school English teacher voice in my memory requires me to understand the tragic flaw of the tragic hero. I find in my traffic light waiting time that this idea of the tragic flaw may be a stumbling block to understanding. Aristotle speaks about Hamartia - the tragic flaw. The Greek New Testament uses the word to mean, among other things, sin. The Philosopher speaks of Hamartia as errors made in ignorance, or by accident. When one combines the concept of Anagnorisis (recognition, particularly self recognition) we can see that tragedy is based on the solitary actors ignorance and smallness in the face of the uncaring immensity that is the external world. It is this ignorance that makes the actors in tragedies appear to be controlled by external forces.

It is the not being able to fully grasp the external world that causes tragic characters to make their all important fall. In this way we can see Oedipus does not have a flaw of rashness, but rather he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. When in his ignorance he thinks he is doing the right thing by fleeing, he is only hastening the inevitable. This lack of control which causes the actors to appear to be little more than playthings of fate is another expression of our ignorance.

The first idea that we should chase out of our heads is the idea of the tragic flaw as being a lack of moral fibre, as moral weakness, or sin. This seems to be mistaken, and is a typical of Christian readings. Hamartia is used in other works of Aristotle to mean an injury caused by accident or ignorance. This exposes one of the founding elements of tragedy, indeed of all of life, put bluntly - we do not know. In the case of Oedipus he is obviously ignorant of his true nature. This because his adoptive parents had lied to him from the start. How much of our lives are based on the small and large lies that our parents and our society tell us? Oedipus more than most, but very few of us can truly say that we know our own history. Even less can we say that we know what will be the outcome of our actions beforehand.

As they are meant to be performed on stage tragedies must deal with action with actors making decisions, allowing the plot to be a revealing of the consequences. To allow the ephemeral, when for a moment ignorance is pushed away. Ignorance and activity, the engine of both tragedy and real life. Agamemnon, cursed down generations for the crimes of an ancestor, ignorantly goes to embrace and is killed. Clytemnestra does not act in ignorance, in the sense that she does not have all the facts. She is trapped by a terrible set of circumstances, and is left with no alternative. Brutalised and raped by Agamemnon, forced into marriage, her first husband and infant son murdered, she must kill Agamemnon to avenge the sacrificial murder of their daughter. She must kill to allow herself to breath, to live, to put to an end to only the sharpest point of her anguish. In turn Orestes must kill his mother, who killed his father, who killed his sister. What a bloody household, all based on the crime of Tantalus, that of killing and cooking his own child to test the Gods. The gods use the House of Atreus as a warning to others not to doubt. The extravagant events control the actors, the actors do not control events. In a very real sense this is a type of ignorance, as events are moving around the actor, and the actor has no control. I think it was Heidegger who referred to time as the horizon of being, here we can amend this postulate and say that it is ignorance which is the horizon of being. As an aside I recall reading a report into work place conditions, and a conclusion was made, it not being overworked that leads to stress, it is the feeling of lack of control.

Many arguments can of course be put forward to refute my point, and I am sure that many of the arguments will be overwhelming. Including my clumsy style and inarticulate way of explaining my ideas. One can say I that cherry pick from the competing versions of the texts of the ancients, that I take parts of the story from one source and another part from a different source. This may be true, but it is not true of all human thought, even if only by accidentally mixing up of conversations or readings, indeed this blending of thoughts is one of the pathways of transmission. A solid and easy line of argument would have to wrapped in the idea that there is no simple way to describe all the stories that are called tragedy. There will always be exceptions and elements that do not fit correctly into any schema. I am happy to stand by my thought that ignorance of true events, and the lack of control of the unfolding world give rise to the tragic actor forced to make choices. Choices which are often between two compelling goods. When they make these choices they do so in an attitude of ignorance. Either they are ignorant of the true situation, or of the thoughts and plans of the other actors, or more abstractly they are ignorant of the external forces which shape and control everyday life. Marx described this buffeting by world historical forces as follows "[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

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Tragedy

Late Afternoon approaching winter
Reddening chill slap across the face.
Low cold sunlight limp long thin shadows
Gray of pale trees swaying the wind.
Smoke rises from Yasnaya Polyana.
The cold hardens the mud and allows
Movement on the roads. And old man stands
One side of the rutted hardened track,
Watching the smoke rising, tears falling,
Anger impotent. Manuscripts torn and burnt,
Tables, chairs, beds, chopped and splintered
All burnt for warmth and contempt. The old
Man stands the side of the road, silent
Tears his hungry hut. Bodies of soldiers
Buried the clear glade desecration.
A feeling of superiority nurtured
By command. Up jumped the troopers.
In a battered ad-hoc armoured car,
Embellished death head cross.
The soldiers laughed and knocked down,
Knees down the frozen ground, the old man.
Shouting orders the old man and his wife
Could not understand. The old man
And his wife implored the invaders,
Who did not want to understand.
Only laughed and pawed the old woman.
Broke the door, chair, all the windows,
All the plates and cups in the house.
The old man cried and begged mercy
Leave us be, we are old. Pawing
The ground and he grabbed one soldier's
Knees. Think of your own gray father,
Your old grandfather, we have nothing,
We care nothing of Stalin, leave us be.
His wife was bleeding from the mouth.
And he wailed all the louder shaking
And impotent. A laughing rifle butt
Ended his talking, started blood flowing.
She flew to his side and the soldiers
Took bottles of home made wine, and two
Chickens throttled and stuffed into
A bag as dinner. Pots and pans
For cooking. The armoured car drove
Rattling and menacing away.

Down the road children huddled,
Wounded soldiers suffered,
An ancient monastery. Look here,
We shall not attack the old and pathetic
They shall soon pass, but here we find
The future, the ones who shall mature
And cut our throats while we sleep. Let us
Free ourselves of this vengeance. With cans
Of petrol and hand grenades the soldiers
Laughed and toasted the fearsome
Cries of screaming choking agony.

Drifters Cafe & Caritas Poetry Event

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Sharp windy, slow setting night walking.

Saturday last, I went out into the city, to the Drifters Internet
Cafe. Nestled off the side street down stairs the market dock
Salamanca shade of Wellington side of town. A relaxed venue for
listening to a poet. Poetry for Pakistan, a fund raiser for the
Caritas Pakistan Flood Appeal. A series of readings had been organised
for the appeal, but this was the only one I could attend. I was lucky
to be able to make it to this reading. More formless than planned out
this document is my attempt to understand what I learnt about the
event.

Ghosts of the Galapagos; the poetry of flight. A series of new lyrics
by Paul Healy. Fog lifting revealing panta, revealing all things, the
picton bridge, the blue heron. I arrived late, mid poem, and began to
quiet sit and poured myself a glass of water. And set myself to
listen. And ordered a cup of chai, frothy in the modern style with a
shake of cinnamon on top. High vaulted and perfumed poetry.

A simple quiet venue, with a small attentive crowd. I was at once
swept up with the flow of the poets words, his skill at 'making', his
simple and confident reading style. As advertised the poetry was a
series of lyrics around the theme of flight, about bird flight. This
ordinary, everyday idea separated itself and allowed multicoloured
ideas to flourish.

I was, with the poem about the lame gull who was able to gain the
choicest food, struck with the scientific cold harded factual manner,
in that compassion may not be the best reaction in many a natural
relationship. The human desire to place our values, and with good
intentions to intervene is not always the best course of action.

Songs of loss and desolation, of joy and astonishment. A dialogue of
nature and a lesson in what is being done in our state. A tale of
chemical warfare in the forests and Tasmanian devil facial tumours in a
poem called simply '1080'.

Everywhere images of the wonder and of the erotic generative spirit of
nature. Will to Power, nature struggling to create and manifest across
many forms. From the rushing diving collared sparrow hawk making a
kill, to the blue heron still on blue rock shading the water to tempt
the little fish, to the unlikely pigeon in some plot of dead land
neither bush nor city highlighted in a ray of setting sunlight, to
clinking currawongs in the Styx Valley sounding like far off church
bells, the images of flight blended with a scientific understanding of
the environment, and created a strong series of lyrics.

The poet confessed his surprise at some poems which seemed to come all
at once, as if formed from the ether. This is of course the result of
study, and practising technique. Leave the reader hanging, the poet
offered as advice, using his own work for examples. Add a strong grasp
of the English tradition, and a love of the classic forms of
poetry. The comparison thoughts that sprang to my mind while words
described the spine tailed swift flying 5000 feet in the sky and
'rides the summer thunder wall', of course was Hopkins, followed by
the ol' Will-of-Wisp Yeats. Scrambled into the forgotten linkages of
the Heraclitian Gyre.

A poem about the Pied Butcher Bird described the harmony of white and
black and gray camouflage colouring, there is a unity in
diversity. Pied Beauty and a similar eye for natural detail as
Hopkins, and while I can not agree with the poet's program of reviving
the classical forms of English poetry, I will agree that the study of
poetry is worthwhile as an end in itself. A rigorous understanding
and appreciation of the various forms of poetry, allow vast fields of
poetic imagination and inspiration to spring to life. Ripe fruit for
the poet to feast upon. Even for the experimental poets it must be
accepted that 'no verse is free', and for all poets that creation is
social creation.

So while there was a strong spiritual element that I could not agree
with, I am only too happy to quote Lenin, “Intelligent idealism is
nearer to intelligent materialism than is stupid materialism." and
leave the subject closed.

Listening to the ABC local radio in the morning, I was at once struck
with the passion and pleased to hear the poet speak of the importance
of supporting young poets, and the need to create a space for young
poets. This is to me very important and if I can add a slogan to the
argument, it would be 'More mentors, Fewer English Teachers.' While I
readily accept that poetry comes in many shapes and sizes, and is
indeed a raw creative purgation involving language, practised by a
wide and diverse section of society, I do find it amusing to hear
academics discuss other academics as having a 'demotic voice.' Allow
me to step off my soap hobby horse box, and commend Paul Healy as a
poet, and even more importantly as a mentor.

Yet another failed poem

Sent this off to a contest for Father's Day Poems. The structure is more Tonka than Tanka, as the third line is not a pivot for the stanza, and the number of beats is not 100% in the 5-7-5-5-5 schema, but pretty close. I tried hard not to create the image of victimhood. Leading into the unknown forest, it is up to us to find a way...

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A Lesson Learnt

Drunk and abusive
Our Father disrupted
Our childhood
Abused my mother and sisters
Shattered our sense of self.

With my own children
I remember and have learnt
All a man can do
Is to break the cycle.
Of domestic violence.

Disappointment

Capital tends to corrupt and demean all things - in this we have sold our house to get away from the ownership society, which was nothing but a right wing con to take our money from us, and to make working people too fearful to revolt, and to try to make the concerns of the ruling class the concerns of the slaves.

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Death comes when the tide is low.

Morning of disappointment and delay
Family sorrow and disappointment.

Mud babies made mawkish delays
And confusions of names 
Placed into the homeless
Busted penniless womb.
An embryonic effigy.

Child of placental error
Mother of freedom.

Always must one smooth away
Impressions left of sleep
And never musty messed up
Pick up that which has fallen 
Nor shall one ever eat any beans 
Or pulses or expose irrational numbers.

One must break from heartier costumes.

Disappointed at the flooding 
Of the tides 
    Pit of the stomach
    Homeless
    Helpless.

Living in spare rooms
Living on kindness.

Diptera.
A large black fly buzzes
Erratic kitchenware.

A wilderness of disappointment
With the present state of affairs.
Disappointment with the sexual act
Disappointment even with the ocean.

Tiny fish school 
A stream and flow
The tidal pale.

Washed up 
Vomited out
Ejected the sea
In her smooth white hand
This white smooth piece
Of pitted whale bone
Vertebrae elaborate 
Of design and texture.
Pouted sand pitted a silent
Terror of months years decades
Held cold dark pressure.

The tiny child hand
Reaches the wet sandy
Beach explores both
Nose and tongue.

Loud lout snore thing 
Shifting of gears
Top to bottom 
Snoring snares 
To catch unawares.

Fancy 
Dreads dance up on
My mind creek 
And crack dissipate.

Tinkling stars of spirits
Annotated parade of tourists
And their dogs.

Settlement Eve - The Witch of the Beach

Standing at yet again a cross roads of my life. went down to the cross roads (with my black dog cloud) fell down on my knees...

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After four months the deed is all but done.

Purging new watery stomach illness.
Lunar flood and ebb, endless tidal rolls.

The flooding tide is exuberance.
The ebbing tide is melancholy.

Myriad shakers whispering over years
Of seashore and her myriad names and roles.

Fashioned a thigh bone unearthed dead child flute
To enchant with listless drowsiness the cruel ones.

The wailing sailing ship rolled industrial seas
And the crew felt jilted by the Boston and London
Owner masters. We need to increase our share.
For are we not the ones who toil the stony
Seas, who climb and fall monotonous motion waves?
Did we not, just last week, farewell mates young and true?
Sun burnt, wind burnt, cold burnt, salt burnt the crew flared
In impious revolt, and hacked about and threw
Christian captain headless over wave splashed side.
Face down the sand the entrance to the inlet.
Earth of the sun made his corpse swell and hotter he grew.
And vigorous came shining greenery and plants,
And ingenious came signing birds and stowaway
Creatures, soon he was covered with sandy life.
On the crew sailed on to fabulous islands
Of the Brazilian freedom coast where lived legion
Squads and ships of freebooters and ragamuffins,
Building families, enlightenment wealth promise,
Made for all in harmony and with equality.
Wisely had the masters insured again lost loot.
Boston and London slept no gains. And the caution
To this day still sleep guards the inlet. Dreaming songs
Remembering cloudless bells to jingle the sea foam
Rolling endless up and down ocean sand shore.

The old woman tosses and shakes her long wet hair,
The gardens of kelp swaying the turbulent seas.
Feared by some she dances and leaps playful dolphins.
Wandering sand songs and bells and haunts ancient
Walking the beach she reads and deciphers fortunes
To come, births and deaths into the future. The shape
Of the foam the sounds of rolling swells and sea shells.

Nascondere

Wow almost a month since my last posting! Time flies. This piece, among other things, was written on Good Friday. So look up Inferno Canto 13 (line 34). Christos Anesti! Christ is risen! Go In Peace.

Nascondere is Italian for Obscure.

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She chose to pass her days
The Greenway Country Comfort.
    Just Behind the Tuggeranong Sports Club.

She chose her end,
On a delightful late autumn;
Typical high pressure system
From out in the roaring Tasman
Afternoon, when there was a 
Slight brisk around and all about 
In the air; Football weather
Her Father would have said, and the 
Planned English planted wide avenues
Of draughtsman inner suburbs flame
Informed a Little Britain.
Goyder Street in Narrabundah,
Majura Avenue in Anslie,
La Perouse St in Red Hill,
Wattle Street in Lynham,
Crunching underfoot acorns.
Crunching underfoot dead dry.

Planted by Edwardian gardeners,
Harvested local old Italian men
Parchment lifeless underfoot.

Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi.

Yellow red orange brown
Falling and floating artificial
Parchment softly to the ground
Decaying and releasing slowly
Releasing crystal sunlife tears.
New growth mulch and filth aroma
Abubble with spores and microbes.

Drifting deftling dancing the air
Softly slowly silent down
Too weak, too powerless to 
Influence; too weak, too scared...
  'Che mai non fur vivi'
Never truly alive.
Caught between...
       And nothing.

One remarkably attractive
Afternoon, tiny white cap waves
Ruffle lake surface.  Flashing police
Light, the speaking crackle,
Amber empty bottles, slow slipping
Drip dropping away.
Slipping away. 
Breath by laboured breath.
Beat by slowing beat.
Now ghost.
Now ivory 
Now stillness.
Now dark.