It’s in a writer’s nature – well mine at least – to want to edit and polish their work until they are satisfied enough to send it off into the world. I look back at my early poetry and think ‘What on earth was going on in my head at that time?’ The temptation is to bring it up to date, but now I’m thinking ‘No, let it have it’s way. It’s who I was, where I was in the sixties and seventies – inspired by the beat generation poets, and Bob Dylan of course.’ Speaking of that great man, he turned eighty this week and is still ‘at his desk’ pouring out his wonderful words and music. His work will be manna for generations to come – listened to, discussed and analyzed. What of us lesser beings? Ours will all disappear in a puff of smoke when we’re gone or relegated, if we’re lucky, to a case under someone’s bed, or on a USB stick in a box of others. So for anyone who is interested, and I guess for my own satisfaction of digging up and having a look at a kind of artistic progression, I thought I’d put a few of my poems up here.
One of my earliest – around 1967.
NO WHITE
Writing ‘d e p r e s s i o n’ takes too long to overcome depression
Give me words like hell tramp bite fight tight TIGHT
Setting up for a night’s painting to find I have no white
no bloody white
a waste of a night
Where are you now
I’m alone without white
And now a Christmas beetle has ambled aimlessly onto my background
and got itself stuck to where the white giraffe was meant to be
And now a war-like mantis – come to contemplate the beetle –
dances in hypnosis
I have no white
So write
Put on some Brubeck
Light a few candles
Write a song
a poem
a fairy-tale
an epic of the heart
in the play-house of my mind
From 1970 –
HOMELESS
He was so concealed beneath his gigantic coat
and so statuesque
that a sparrow came to rest
unwittingly
upon his shoulder
A wave of sympathy swept over me
but as I passed I saw his face
He knew the bird was there
His face alight
This fleeting whisper of a touch was all he needed
Just that thing that day
to make his life complete
From 1975 –
TAXI SERVICE
Your taxi service must keep you on your toes
All those wealthy old dames visiting the sick and lonely
The mothers whose kids have messed their pants
and don’t wish to be seen by other messy kids
in their sailor suits and confidence
The bus drivers who long to be camel drivers
The camel drivers who long to be bike riders
The bike riders who long to be skin divers
The skin divers who long to be sky divers
The sky divers who long to be sky writers
The sky writers who long to be copy writers
And me
the girl who is always carrying soup and goodies to the other side of town
1976 –
BESIDE YOU
Laying down beside you
easily
Watching the sun rise through the tangleness of your beard
Feeling the proof of your breathing
upon my possessive arm
Knowing that the morning sun
will bound in through the window
and creep out through the door
before the magic ends
From 1985 –
WHERE OPPOSITES MEET
You feel at home in the rumbling city
humming commerce never-ending
Asleep in the awake metropolis
or awake in the crowded nights
In dim lit places blue with smoke
bodies close with talking over music
blended smells of beer and perfumed girls
City buildings like a forest closing in
and keeping you secure
I feel my best in bird-songed country places
Morning magpies troubling spacious silence
Sounds and smells of sheep and grasses
Fresh ploughed earth
and walking
in the green soft sunny hills
Water trickling
sparkling over ancient rocks
Gum trees for security
Surely there must be a neutral place as well
where opposites like us can be in sync
and explicate the bounty of the two
1990 –
EXPLAIN LIFE
From wence do werds hav their orijin
Eksplain to a child egzactlee wy shooger is speld thu way it iz
when shooz is speld thu way it iz
and wot evva happend to that littel ‘p’ that hides itself
wenevva sumbody menshons neumonia
Wy don’t I rite in my poems of wrivers rithing like snakes
If odd is speld that way
and sea the way it iz
wy not an oddisea for Homer
Do ‘c’ and ‘k’ yoozually get around togetha just for kix
If Dylan iz a man and Lassie a dog
wy am I a woman
There are dozens more – probably hundreds actually. Mostly hand-written in notebooks, on scraps of paper, but thankfully all in one drawer. So many are deeply personal, therapy for me in times of hardship. The outpourings of a creative mind. Making sense of love, pain, happiness, anger. And then there are word pictures – like taking a photograph of something that pleases the eye. But unlike photography, in poetry one can also evoke sounds, smells, touch. The following one, written around 2014, comes under this banner.
WAITING WATCHING LISTENING
Gentle breezes breathing through the Mallee
Softly tapping straggly strips of bark against the fences
Jet car drone of blowflies passing
Squealing bark of kelpies after rabbits
Heads and front legs down the burrows
Damp and heavy sand sprayed out behind them
Rumbling road trains in the distance
Topped up loads of grain and sheep and mail
Hum of wires sagging over lengthy spans across the landscape
Distant flock of prime merinos shimmering at their trough
Muttering of the seasoned leath’ry farmer at his fences
Stapling
Straining
Twitching wires
Sweating in the scorching heat
and thirsty
Sucking on a stalk of straw
to keep his mouth from drying
Poetry is an acquired taste. Most people prefer a good novel, memoir, short story. Am I right? I would be interested to know if readers of my blogs would like to see more poetry, or would you prefer stories of my life? I may never hear, so in the meantime, I just keep stringing words together, because it’s what I do.
Till next time,
Warmly,
Sue
PS. If you wish, you can leave a comment in the box below. These are for my eyes only – not seen by the public.