THE PAULINE GROUP A Literary Society SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955 Edited by Julian Woods

by Julian Woods

PARTS 1 & 2 FROM “FRUITFUL FUTILITY”

  Norris Devir

  1.

  The fledgling tipped from the nest, fights no more

  Than we who stutter through our repertoire of life,

  The hawk of hate descends to scrape a ragged claw

  Across our faces in the night, the buzzard,

  Haunts our footsteps through the silent blizzard,

  Disease and death stalk us and come

  Between ourselves and us, in the shadow of the sun.

  The fledgling has not half our hazard.

  2.

  Wind up the clockwork spring before the dawn,

  Set it going with the turning of the world,

  Wound down by passing time and by its wearing torn,

  It shall be by nightfall dead and all uncoiled.

  Wind up a human heart with a flesh-bound key,

  Look how worn and ragged it becomes in the washing of the sea.

  We are moulded in our mothers in a spark

  Struck by parent flints blindly in desire,

  We grow around our lives, our hearts

  Closing in the precious speck of fire.

  It grows within us as we grow and grow.

  Once set in motion we are ever moving on,

  The morning comes, and midday, and the setting of the sun.

  The sun creeps slowly through the morning, the hours labour by,

  Till slipping past the axis, it hurries down the sky.

  We all grow old, and growing, die.

  HANDS

  Winsome Latter

  This lovely certainty that our fingers feel,

  Hand curled in hand,

  As if they live entirely to themselves

  And their deep urgency.

  An ardent rhythm of the blood

  Spells each to each

  (In tiny spurts of secret life) -

  A Mystery the mind

  Should not contain.

  Unfold not yet, dear love, your hand from mine;

  A Star swept down the sky a million miles

  Just now ……

  And in that swift eternity apart,

  My finger-tips have sought, and found,

  Your heart!

  ON HER BIRTHDAY

  Roger F. Brown

  Remembering the long swell

  Bubbling through steadfast rocks

  Hung steeply in their clouds of foam,

  The heart is challenged by first frost;

  The morning’s dazzle thrown by careless sea.

  ,

  Pea-green of shallows, and the salt

  Spray blown for wind’s delight

  Are lost to that long winter.

  On your birthday crisp air

  Drowns old summers, wishing no return

  Of that sun-fever born of

  Long days’ drowsy passion.

  I, whose wish for you must be

  As those of children, Many

  Happy Returns, know few returns

  Are granted, few desired, for

  Those clear pools

  Whose stillness held your image

  Cloud

  As first gust from the south

  Throws flying shadows on the sea.

  Agatha smiled

  The hard barren wrinkles

  Were cream

  And a softness gleamed in her eyes.

  The ghosts that burn

  And the dry wasted days in dusty offices

  Blossom at last in a gold harvest,

  Old desert seeds in the rain.

  The Pauline Group, 6 July 1950

  CAFÉ CHARACTERS

  Bill Belson

  1

  One, two, three,

  One, two three,

  Ear-rings are hanging free;

  Up and down at every bite,

  Following her gastronomical delight.

  Steady beat on a three course meal,

  The same for entrée, sweet and veal;

  Slow and then a-twitter dee,

  Sending down a cup of tea;

  Delighted leap and a silver chirp,

  Telling the quake of a well-hidden burp;

  A-burl, a-whirl, a leaf in the wind,

  Over the life of a woman who sinned;

  Long deep sway around and across,

  Oh what a shame the Chinamen lost;

  Dancing a jig and a vigorous twitch,

  Sydney’s fleas, and how they itch;

  Twitter still and twitter dee,

  I must go home and get John’s tea.

  One, two, three,

  One, two, three,

  Ear-rings are hanging free.

  2

  It is extremely difficult,

  You will realize,

  To drink out of a great round spoon (soup)

  And at the same time maintain your poise.

  Nevertheless, I try.

  3

  Tight mouthed, pinning down a steak, she sawed. The boy seemed quite forgotten.

  And then, abruptly, she ceased. In a halo of silence of all the hub-bub of grating knives, she smiled. Smile like a little breeze of heaven. Told a whisp word shy, dimpling and gentle round the eyes. The boy stirred.

  A fork squeaked: irresistibly and with uncontrollable intensity she bore down on her meat and sawed again, her dirty soul retching in her hands

  CAFÉ CHARACTERS

  Roger Challis Brown

  “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to earth from earth to heaven.”

  - Shakespeare

  His eye doth rove from tea to toast

  And back to tea again;

  He watcheth all the characters

  And heareth what they’re sayin’.

  His pencil flies, his brow is lined,

  He acteth as one “touched”;

  I wonder if the blighter knows

  That he himself is watched.!

  LOVE’S SERENADE

  Gerard Hamilton

  Under yonder towering gums,

  Whose lazy shades cool the green,

  Would I but have a maiden

  To live this morning dream.

  Would she but tilt her head and blush,

  At eyes that lingered o’er her beauty;

  Then would my arms gain daring strength,

  About her slender shoulders fold.

  Would then her lips surrender,

  The precious spirits of earthly love,

  The ardent force of heart in splendour,

  And forget the Heaven above.

  Our sublimity would incarnate the Divine,

  And sure as tomorrow’s sun,

  Must lift in the sky to shine,

  I and she in my arms would be one.

  THE TYRANT

  Roger Challis Brown

  Nor can we hold this hour

  with any mesh of mind’s contriving;

  but with a strand of your dark hair

  I’ll trip this tyrant, time,

  and send him reeling in his stride

  to spill his hoarded minutes in a careless tide;

  for in your eyes I’ll find reward

  and on your lips, a prize so proud

  he’ll wait a score more years to claim;

  then, since he dare not mar the hour’s delight,

  we may defy him, though he end the night.

  PARROT

  Roger Challis Brown

  A parrot came to the hawthorn bush

  while I turned leaves this morning,

  taking a spray of scarlet berries

  in one claw, and chattering the morning’s

  inconsequent small talk, not caring

  whether I listened, and snubbing the sky

  with an impudent tilt of tail.

  Soft, ripe berries fell, the white of his beak

  flickered among dark leaves;

  he held that moment’s mastery,

  was careless tyrant of my time,

  until the flash of swift wi
ngs

  swept him away, leaving the scarlet clusters

  nodding where his head had been.

  POEM

  N.P. Devir

  I thought I heard across the darkening air

  The voice of a million children in despair;

  I listened out across the shadowed sea

  But heard only the ocean’s ancient poetry.

  THE SAND AND THE RAIN

  N.P. Devir

  The sand says,

  “The desert oak strains in the dry wind,

  And cracks! its timbers split and shattered

  By a whipcrack of dry lightening

  On a clear day.”

  The rain says,

  “The ships come in like bloated cows,

  Coming slowly into port to let

  Their masters strip their udders dry;

  And a yacht cleaves the blueness

  On a clear bay.”

  The sand says,

  “The throats of inland rivers are grooved

  And scarped by the roughened tongue

  Of some old volcanic flood, but

  Now hard and choked by dust

  That will not flow.

  An old man’s breath of wind

  Rattles the skeleton blades of grass,

  And disturbs the sterile seeds

  That will not grow.”

  The rain says,

  “The pollen-bearing breezes blow across

  The swaying field; the railway trucks

  Are stacked with bursting bags of grain;

  The silos emulate the hills; and cattle

  Populate the slaughter-yards;

  The dead are peaceful where they lie.”

  The sand says,

  “The barren breezes blow across

  The naked earth; and men eat

  Snakes and flies; where only ants

  Construct their silo-cities; and women

  Pound the ant-nests into loaves like bread;

  The dead are angry and will not die.”

  CYNICAL SCRAP

  N.P. Devir

  In the other room, her bedroom, she was crying --- a horrible ugly cry. He could picture her looking ridiculous and tearfully bedraggled. That would teach the old hound not to eat garbage; if she had no garbage tin, then he would present one to her for her next birthday. Human guts have trouble digesting half-rotten refuse --- even hers.

  He gloated smilingly as he looked up the doctor’s phone number. She had scoffed when he had blamed her food for his sickness. She had laughed and jeered and he had raged inside with a passive anger. After all, he could not strike her; she was a woman, if not a lady, and the law made no distinction. Besides, landladies can put you out if they don’t like you.

  A confused feeling of pride and remorse was going on inside him when he heard her holding a loud conversation with the woman next door, telling her what a wonderful boarder she had. How many men would get up at two o’clock in the morning, and get a doctor for a silly old fool like me, she wanted to know. He was thinking what a silly old bitch she was, as he put her tea-things on a tray; little does she know, he thought, little does she know.

  FOG

  L.J. Pearce

  In white cloak and hat broad brimmed

  Along the water’s edge there went

  One obedient to the wind.

  His calm face betrayed a mind

  Gripped ‘by the elements without

  From service to the inward kind.”

  His willy-nilly way is not admitted:

  The graceful stride in soft voluminous cloak:

  The fresh scent of its wool is bad to busy folk.

  The straight lines of their races are lost

  An apprehension of “turning back”.

  Hold them, vituperating, on the track.

  And many a hoot goes up in fright

  And finds in his wayward course a wrong delight,

  Of his superior illusive might.

  His unruffled face his rolling cloak pursues

  Lengthens on the fields and water at his sides

  And to leave he goes slowly above the sun.

  You turn away sickened at heart by our faces

  They contain not a sign that instructs your heart

  How to go one to its longed-for places

  But one, that a step from yourself, means return to the start.

  Perhaps the curve of a nostril on to a cheek;

  Perhaps the stride of a native with kingly physique;

  Perhaps the joyous gait of a girl with her first-born child;

  Arrests you on the station, the wharf or the ‘drome.

  You remain with the clock in the street catching the passing words.

  The beating hearts in the café envelope you with their warmth.

  And at length you remember -

  In eternity, the fearful longing for the human face.

  And perhaps you remember the chain between you and the four-footed kind

  Which by acquaintance with the early morning street, has grown no easy thing to break.

  The smooth white bones lie on the table

  Death is enough for the mind to attend to,

  To purchase thought from, to elevate you above the earth,

  To reduce chains to a remnant about the wanderer’s waist.

  Near, the smooth limbs in the bed that will accept you

  Your mind will also find wings to take it aloft

  Able to continue its reflective lonely way

  Above the earth laid out below.

  Life and death are equally rich for the one

  Who wishes to work for Poetry, Divinest of masters -

  Inflexible about your leaving walls, relations, careers,

  But unstinting of gifts from his limitless halls.

  The ball that will roll with the world will wear out,

  The one lightly tossed among hands, over heads, will shine

  (line missing)

  NIGHT SKETCH

  Leon Stemler

  Phantom of a rustling breeze has

  Shuddered through the dark-stained wood,

  Then frozen

  Still.

  Silent cold is drifting through the trees.

  Brooding cold is floating,

  White, and

  Thick,

  The frosted breath of night.

  A moon-filled lake, and

  Star-stilled sky.

  A road of silver dust

  By shadow softly pierced.

  Crickets throb, and

  House stare, in

  Wide-eyed night

  Awake…

  WOP OF THISTLE

  Leon Stemler

  With wool and water, weather-weaned,

  All to purpose none whatever,

  Leaves and trees, and hillocks bristle -

  Willowed, widowed, wops of thistle!

  THE WILLOW TREE

  Garth Everson

  See how the willow-tree’s gold leaves

  Fall down; drift and float

  Upon the surface of this pool, -

  Then sink below.

  But now the slender sapling’s green

  Leafed sides are never still;

  The spring breeze seems

  To stir the leafy streams

  Of this quietly flowing tree

  Standing, drooping here, beneath the hill.

  OFTEN IN THE MIDNIGHT CANDLE’S BEAM

  Garth Everson

  Often in the midnight candle’s beam

  I have seen ……

  Often in the midnight candle’s beam,

  I have been;

  Often in the midnight candle’s ghostly gleam,

  There have seemed,

  So many things of which I had not dreamed

  But for the midnight candle’s beam.

  THE WRONG WAY UP, THE RIGHT WAY DOWN

  Ian Dunlop

  Below’s above,

  The floor’s the sky.

  Oh, tell me little bung-dung fly,<
br />
  Oh why,

  Oh how you grow your little soul,

  Do you loop - - or do you roll?

  WITHOUT SUGAR

  Ian Dunlop

  The Chinaman believe you me,

  Doth gloat when drinking fragrant tea.

  The Celt or Pict with steady head

  May burn within the Scotch instead.

  The flighty female sipping gin

  With her sophisticated grin;

  The sailor’s rum, the worker’s beer -

  But let me make this very clear -

  I prefer coffee.

  The Pauline Group, 25 July 1950

  THE GREAT SOUTHLAND (EXCERPTS)

  Rex Ingamells

  1

  Corroboree-fires cast glints upon the tides

  of Arafura on the Northern Coast,

  and licked with light the red MacDonnell Gaps,

  and ran in pools of colour on the dim

  dry sands of creek-beds in the Flinders Ranges;

  corroboree-fires burned in a thousand places;

  the chants swelled in a thousand dialects,

  on windy plains and under gully boulders,

  at tree-fringed rivers and at sandy soaks,

  beneath the stars and moon, or stars alone,

  or compress of the sky-obscuring cloud ……

  Corroboree-fires blazed up and lit the writhen,

  bark-trailing trunks of Millewa eucalypts ……

  Millewa … Stars in the Water … The Water, speaking

  night-long to sand-bars, cliffs and mu-banks, took

  the twinkle of stars and leaping tongues of flame

  into its shining darkness, bore the chants

  of Totemites far up and down the reaches …

  and birds in bushland, startled out of sleep,

  made noisy protest, swelling the frenzied din

  of the stamping and quivering files of shouting men …

  Millewa … Stars in the Water … Millewa, where

  The Totems gathered for ceremonial;

  where Old Men sat in Council, as elsewhere

  in all the Tribal Countries, and decided

  each question in unanimity … Old River

  of Legend, River of myriad camps

  whose tales derive from dim Alcheringa.

  Ah, Yesterday’s pregnant Dreaming!

  Alcheringa, holding all things, walling with vigour

  the lungs of Nature’s breathing, holding all Time

  in unstraining embrace, holding the camps,

  the battles the frivolities, the huntings,

  the feastings, the sleepings, the dawn-awakenings,

  the night-corroborees, the gay and the sad eyes,

  the joy and the travail,

  of the dark People.

  I am their watching of sunset over the billabongs,

  dawn-flare in the mountains, in sandhill solitude,

  among the gibbers and beside the sea;

  I am their listening to the leaf’s word

  in the mulga country and the gum country, to the wave’s sound

  on the long, long coast of rock and cliff and dune;

  my ears ring

  with the agony of unheard coo-ee in the mountains;

  my eyes mist at the late light’s going,

  galah-hued, into deserted coastal cliff and sand,

  and at the parrot-flush or sun-rise, flaunting

  above the inland ranges …

  The Land’s Forgotten People have returned

  to shatter my smug exterior of cities,

  clutch on my heart with strong and gentle finger;

  the Children of the Dream-Time claim my soul …

  2

  CHENG HO

  Rex Ingamells

  Cheng Ho, obedient to the Emperor Yung -

  Three quarters of a century before

  Vasco de Gama rounded Africa -

  left China for Ceylon with sixty-two

  great junks in a single fleet.

  He reached Sumatra,

  and then turned westward, but a storm arose,

  with thunder, lightning, and torrential rain

  that yet could not allay such furious seas

  as reared and curled above the cumbrous craft,

  crushing upon them with relentless fists.

  Some foundered - painted dragons diving under

  the turbulent waters, not to reappear;

  some piled in wreckage on adjacent shores;

  and others were harried, out of all control,

  for league on league to South, before their crews,

  wearied and buffeted, could find resource

  to measure their dire distress and seek to mend it.

  The Emperor Ying Tsung, in later years,

  regarded a porcelain map, an exquisite thing,

  most delicately wrought, and cried: “Cheng Ho,

  in spite of the disaster, ought to be remembered,

  since survivors of his fleet

  marked out a strange barbaric coast. Behold,

  it has a longer coast than China’s, that

  remote and unattractive Southern Land.

  Such evidence is curious for scholars.”

  3

  In all the ports of the world, all time

  since ships were made that could forsake the shallows,

  seamen, constrained awhile to stay ashore,

  like gulls perched on the sands ready for flight,

  have sat and fidgeted upon the stone steps, beside

  the water’s edge, and looked across the waves

  away from land, their eyes akin to ocean,

  with passing shadows of clouds, and tumbling flecks

  of foam, and airy veils of spray, and hover

  and swoop of gull-wings, with gulls’ wavering cries ……

  and some of these impatient sailors dreamed,

  on sunny or windy days, in temperate

  or hot or wintry climes, in circumstances

  washed over by long centuries, washed over

  and drowned with little familiarities,

  the unseen time-deep weeds of life once lived ……

  dreamed. Some of these forgotten sailors dreamed

  of wonders over-sea, some things they knew

  and some imagined ……

  Old weathered salts

  of ancient Greece would tell of Western Islands,

  and surely were believed ……

  In Portugal

  They told of Prester John, and were believed ……

  In Persia, Tyre, Java, and Malaya

  were men who had voyaged far and witnessed marvels,

  who dreamed in the sun with eyes on glinting waters ……

  And by the China Sea were slant-eyed salts,

  face-coarsened and hand-hardened, who saw past

  the bobbing junks that traded with Cipangu

  to scenes the many could not dream of ……

  One

  or two or three, a few, one here, one there,

  native to Baghdad, China, Portugal,

  born to one generation or another

  in span of space and time …… a few …… a few

  dreamed of the Land of Parrots . . . . . Ah, bright birds,

  flame spears above the bush of Capricorn ……

  dreamed of the Land of the South, and carried visions

  of Carpentaria or Barrier sunsets, flaunting

  within their minds, while learned scholars merely

  conjectured with arguments of abstract logic,

  yet to be proven, and most to be proven wrong ……

  Australian shores are haunted by the ghosts

  of early visitors, which all may see

  and follow into mists of speculation

  losing them where the parrot-sunsets burn

  on cloud on bush on hill and coastal dune.

  Hold gently and lightly shreds of rumour, showing

  upon this chart, and this …… Half
-dreaming, murmur

  words written long ago ……

  Ah, fragile threads

  which show that someone knew …… that someone knew ……

  the Psittacorum Terra, land of Parrots ……

  Someone marked them, someone marked the parrots.

  In the Land of the South are birds, bright birds ……

  such brilliant feathered creatures that astound

  the eyes and heart of a beholder, standing

  lonely, forgetting loneliness, observing

  flying into the sun or out of the sun

  above old trees, arching against white clouds

  and blue sky … Bright birds, bright birds … golden, green,

  scarlet and vivid blue …… whistling and never still ……

  wild things of unsullied Nature, never silent ……

  spirits of beauty, whose unfettered vigour

  startles the wanderer and causes his blood to burn

  within him the knowledge of life, to pulse

  loud in his temples with music of the unleashed

  longings of ineffable apprehension

  of freedom …… Oh, bright birds, bright birds, bright birds

  of the virginal Land of the South, flamboyant birds

  in skies of morning flame, of evening flame,

  of blazing midday blue, of any time

  of the long and vigorous, long and dreamy, days,

  vibrant with song where life and dream are one,

  where strength and beauty join, and truth and legend ……

  bright birds of the Land of the South, a-wing today

  and yesterday, and before that, before, before,

  in the dawn of the world …… bright birds, bright birds,

  flying and crying, swift spears of voice and fire,

  filling the dawn of the world in the dazzling South

  with unquenchable conflagration of feather and tongue ……

  Bright birds, possessing the skies of Capricorn ……

  4

  Upon a bright and burning sea, three ships

  of distant Europe, and Magellan’s crews ……

  For week on week, no tempest harried them,

  but horrors worse than tempest hemmed them in,

  who saw no habitation but their ships,

  who found no island foods, no springs of water.

  They slaked their thirst with dregs as vile as bilge;

  they ripped the hides from off the masts at last,

  tough hides, which, hardened in the wind and weather

  they dragged for days in ship-wake, broiled and ate.

  Men died in misery, with stench of sores,

  Scorbutic wretchedness that drained and soured

  The blood and scoured eruptions through the flesh

  And fouled and scarred the skin to rottenness.

  Strained eyes of sick and dying found at last,

  upon the sea’s rim, Desadventurados,

  islands so named, as Pigafetta tells

  because they mocked at tragic mariners,

  as deserts barren of society

  yielding no shred of sustenance or comfort.

  The ships passed by. Magellan held a course

  just North of South, the Pole Star kept abeam

  at night ……

  And so another month wore on

  amid a vast and lonely sea.

  Three ships,

  ghostly bright in daylight’s burning winds,

  And ghastly grey beneath indifferent stars ……

  The canvas hung in tatters from the yards,

  and all the crews could do was let them fray.

  Could men whose food was leather, flesh of rat,

  or last mixed dust of biscuit and rat-droppings,

  remember the change of watch? With tortured joints,

  gums swollen over teeth, eyes puffed and burning,

  they moaned upon the decks; and they forgot,

  amid the sliding murmur of the sea,

  whose watch it was, and why or where they sailed.

  Death reaped a gruesome harvest, would have turned

  those ships to aimless, drifting charnel hulks

  had not the Lord and His Mother sent good weather

  and occasional gentle rain to combat thirst

  until

  one dawn on a cobalt-coloured sea

  “Vigia …… vigia ……” feeble, incredible cry

  from the maintop of the Trinidad, and “Vigia ……

  vigia …… vigia ……”

  cries, light feathers of Hope,

  wafted from ship to ship of that Armada.

  Hearts leapt to a dawn of Isles and Lateen Sails,

  and starving men clung, sobbing, to the bulwarks.

  5

  GLIMPSES OF EARLY SYDNEY

  The bullock-wagon strains through dusty streets

  in Sydney Town of old time, fully laden

  with goods from Hawkesbury and Parramatta,

  watched by the rowdy urchins out in the sun,

  playing in front of houses and shops, their limbs

  straight and supple and healthy, grubby, yet lit

  with the blowing warmth and strength of the Southern Land.

  Their eyes are keen, are frank, are full of mischief ……

  The energy of these children is not matched

  In older communities, in foggier climes ……

  The children of the South, though times are evil

  have priceless blessings which will mount in the future,

  derived from the sun, and the breath of the bush and sea.

  The fathers and mothers of many of them are lags,

  but their children’s children will fight in the cause of Freedom.

  ………

  These are the days of the Rum Monopoly,

  insidious craving for spirits in the town

  unleashed and brought to blaze of ruination

  for the desperate and weak, to swift enrichment

  of ruthless and exploiting officers

  who corner cargoes of ships at lowest cost

  and sell for extravagant profit - holding, in rum

  the bribe and balm to many a tortured conscience.

  A hogshead buys two hundred acres of land;

  a keg will buy a house; a sot, perhaps,

  will sell a decent wife for keeps for a keg -

  she glad of the bargain, too, in early Sydney.

  The women convicts quickly settle in

  to the beck and call of Sydney ……

  women tossed

  on tides of male expedience and lust;

  women caught by vices of the town -

  the mistresses of soldiers, molls of convicts ……

  The women transportees - or those with looks,

  not too habitual in prudery

  to use their wits - - have all the town at their feet;

  and some are tartars, and some honest women.

  Reiby is lucky with that girl of his.

  Tom, the ship’s officer, is not too proud

  to marry Mary Haydock.

  The dark cloud

  is evaporated witched away by her kiss.

  She tends his business and makes money.

  Little bonneted widow of this

  picture: rather funny -

  with as strong-as-granite dignity even so,

  eyes alight still, though cheeks no longer glow

  …… Today my feet walked singing in her Lane.

  In that silent, drab and grey place, ghosts in my brain

  thronged, History’s strangers ……

  There I searched, as though

  to find that sweet little horse-thief of so long ago.

  6

  Here is a new tradition, sprawling and high,

  cemented and morticed with sorrow and toil and joy.

  Think of slouch hats and bayonet-victories,

  bravery in jungles, convict skeletons,

  the sto
ries of gold, bales of the finest wool,

  full silos of wheat, a written Constitution,

  lock-outs and strikes, the Broken Hill Proprietry,

  home-made Governors-General and the cricketer Bradman.

  But Australia is more than this, is more than us.

  Take all our cities away, and Australia remains ……

  Whisk all the white men and their story away

  from scenes of their jubilance and desolation,

  and still Australia remains …… Oh, unperturbed,

  lustrous and lovely, her Alcheringa.

  Not enough to conquer her bush, and cut

  her vastness into paddocks, rape her earth;

  not enough to fatten on her wealth,

  and see no beauty, blind to the radiant soul

  of this Land’s Mystery, her Spirit’s promise,

  oldest continent of the Imagination.

  Australia has been sought and partly found,

  for she is only gradually known ……

  We who have cramped, or sought to cramp her, learn

  Australia is superb in our mistakes.

  We are the cramped ones, who have failed to measure

  to her vast glory with our little minds.

  POEM

  June Hartnett

  The slow digging under fold and fallow,

  Under the grassed countryside of your life:

  Burrowing, in undulate path we strive

  Upward to the sun. In the dark below

  Seethed fire of flesh, woven with earth, fellow

  To purgatory, blinds, holds, retracts. Strife

  Defeats will, and will, strife. Too much alive

  Are we.

  Consider the lily. Lain low

  And winter-dormant, it feels the sap stir,

  Sends the pricking shoot sunwards. Husk, riven,

  Is left underground: flower finds sun’s store.

  In the time of the lily, see! We SHALL

  Break surface. Pity us now, fir driven.

  A BITTER MEASURE

  June Hartnett

  I have painted ballet scenes

  Upon the retina of night,

  And danced with you, fantastically,

  A spectre measure of delight.

  Our hands touched, that never touch;

  There you loved, who laugh at me:

  We pirouetted, each to each,

  Drawn by a scarlet melody.

  But you are dead, who never lived;

  And at the cold eclipse of night,

  I tread in fearful mimicry

  A bitter measure of delight.

  POEM

  June Hartnett

  … in the ships at Mylae …

  and on the water-wheel,

  The old wind fans me,

  Myself upon the water-wheel.

  The oleanders.

  Look! The old wind shakes them.

  There were other oleanders

  In another garden, and another, and …

  In my cup of bone lie mixed

  Other flowers and other worlds,

  And yonder all before me lie

  Deserts of oleander trees …

  A little thought upon a leaf

  Confesses life was never brief.

  And still it knew

  The thread I threw.

  I threw it in the shuddering air;

  It, phosphorescent, wavered there,

  And fell between us.

  In the ships at Mylae

  It was thus.

  I climb the water-wheel.

  MAGIC… For Patricia

  Bill Richards

  One will remember; though embittered ye are

  Howl down those voices which your heart once heard,

  The still, small voices and the quiet songs

  May soon be stifled by new hymns of hate

  And stench of hate, and hopelessness and pain

  Replace the fresh, illusive scents we know;

  But though the tides of time erode your face

  Though Sand-edged scouring winds strip off your bloom

  Though all our moons go mad and this tormented world

  Is bundled off the edge of everything,

  For me there will be certainties that stand

  Inside the magic circle, out of reach

  Of wrenching fingers and relentless laws

  And while the story of green boy and girl

  Survives a planet’s wreck, a beauty’s tomb,

  We still may find a track, and as for me

  I think there is sufficient cause to sing.

  CITY AND COUNTRY PIECES

  Bill Belson

  I (Hawkesbury)

  Ringed round in hills heft high in silence,

  Moons the sea and no moon;

  Soft-seethe and silver cool in darkness,

  A-murmur only;

  Only the ache of the stones in the hill,

  Wrack-wrung with stress

  And no crying.

  II (Agatha)

  Agatha smiled.

  The hard barren wrinkles

  Were cream,

  And a softness gleamed in her eyes

  The ghosts that burn,

  And the dry wasted days in dusty offices

  Blossom at last in a gold harvest -

  Old desert seeds in the rain.

  WAR CLOUDS: KOREA

  R. Challis Brown

  So from another’s newspaper

  held upside down I spell

  yet crazier nightmare

  to destroy the world’s rest. The headlines

  snare the eye to tell

  this crowded trainloads destination,

  and at last deny

  false promise of uneasy peace.

  Perhaps the long deflation

  of the spirit’s credit has been

  overdone; these faces

  meet old fatal circumstances

  as something long foreseen.

  THE HILL

  Gwen West

  What we were in search of,

  You and I

  Just as we stood there

  Land against the sky?

  I with my dreams of life and youth,

  A wider searching for the truth;

  A little careless then of those

  Of quiet thoughts and calm repose;

  Wildness and joy were struggling free

  From arms that waited there for me.

  What were you thinking of?

  How could I know?

  Only the years have spoken

  I love you so.

  YOUTH’S HERITAGE

  Gwen West

  We have broken all the precepts,

  We have smashed the world’s decrees.

  We have plundered, raped, and destroyed with hate

  The cities built outside our gate …

  The world is yours!

  We have spilt the blood of our noble youth,

  We have laughed at love and twisted the truth,

  We have cursed and broken the bonds so sworn;

  We’ve sung of hate to the yet unborn …

  The world is yours!

  Yet from this chaos we must rebuild

  This splendid wreckage of a million dreams;

  You will cast the world in a fairer mould,

  A shrine of beauty ever to behold …

  This world is yours!

  BROTHER, ARE YOU GOING?

  Werner Stern

  Walk on

  Your narrow strip of wet sand.

  Walk it

  From the beginning to the end.

  Some of you walk and seek,

  Look to both sides intent,

  Feel the cold sand,

  Hear the mocking water -

  Know that you ARE walking.

  Some of you fall on the path

  And let the lift of the waves

  Be your eternal epitaph.

  Some of you swagger ahead

  With resolution -

 
; But you are dead

  As of the sand.

  Most of you walk a path,

  A straight path that has been walked

  By the bones of your fathers

  And the dust of those before him.

  And there are some of you,

  That cannot walk

  Because you do not know how to.

  But,

  No matter how big your feet,

  No matter how quiet your beat,

  The waves will rise,

  And smooth out your path;

  They will drag each grain of sand

  And lay it gently in its place,

  Drag each grain out,

  Out,

  Like time will drag you

  From the ears, eyes, lips,

  the noses, faces,

  the bodies and souls

  Of humanity

  They will level you out.

  You and your footsteps

  Till the sands

  Are smooth

  As the sea of your dreams,

  And the road will be flat again

  For those that follow.

  CHRIST, THAT MY LOVE

  Diana Burton

  Will you not tell me why it is

  That my strong scented roses are all dying?

  Already I can hear nothing

  In my music making but a lost crying.

  Will you not tell me a little cause

  For the wind in the tall pines suddenly sighing?

  The night is beginning to grow chill

  And my pigeons are awakened and flying.

  Will you not tell me the true reason

  Why there is no longer affirming or denying?

  The colours on the palette no longer laugh.

  The moon turned away without replying.

  Will you not tell me what is the matter?

  Will you give no answer at all to me crying?

  For the earth is clammy and the stars are inimical.

  I hate you for dying.

  EXTRACTS FROM “THE ATOM”

  Bill Belson

  1. Listen to it, fellow:

  Listen to the end.

  This thunder of their making,

  This power of their genius,

  In bringing them down,

  And the ages are a trifle in the chaos.

  The cities are in dust

  And a fire flames in a desolate sky;

  The people, the lambs with the wolves,

  Are dying like flies.

  This scourge is sweeping the earth,

  Irresistible and all-consuming;

  The people, the lambs with the wolves,

  Are in flight, seeking the untouched places;

  But where will they fly

  For there are NO untouched places.

  This weapon is the myriad octopus

  That reaches into all the secret crannies

  And covers the wilderness with hungry fingers,

  RUBBING ALL OUT.

  …

  2. Voice: Will you be their gadfly then?

  Peters: Not all gadfly, not all sting …

  But gadfly too I’ll be,

  Stinging mercilessly,

  Prodding.

  This I’ll be,

  But I tell you, friend,

  That there is but one end for him who stings.

  Let him once refute their taboos,

  Let him once deride their customs,

  And they will tear him down

  And smash him bleeding into dirt.

  Gently, gently, reprimand them on the things that do not matter,

  Pander to their self-important whims,

  And they will love you like a little king.

  But let him be the gadfly,

  Relentless, stinging,

  And they will go over him like a deluge,

  Grinding,

  Shredding limb from limb,

  Roaring angrily

  Because they have been wronged,

  Furious

  Because someone has told them they are not gods.

  STONE WALLS

  Dave Rutherford

  Sandstone walls, grey walls,

  Darkened by the dust of time,

  Stand firm in storms

  Are softened by the rains,

  And bleached in sunlight.

  The enveloping ivy and green creepers

  Hide the strength of man-made walls

  And give them contours and shadows,

  Shadows on the stones,

  As clouds make shadows on the fields;

  Friendly are these walls, green coated walls

  Which enclose us in our sheltered life.

  But others, made of similar stone,

  Are cruel and hard and never-yielding,

  Enclosing man and deadening his soul,

  Surrounding hushed and bitter thoughts

  Which are like chains around men’s hearts.

  But our walls are kind,

  And having heard the laughter

  Of youth, grow mellow;

  And warmed by friendships

  Within their care,

  Guard us in our sheltered life.

  COAL AND CANDLE CREEK

  Dave Rutherford

  Through the sunlight comes the scent of burning gum;

  Trees stand cool to the water’s edge,

  Glist’ning, sparkling star-like with its thousand gleams

  Shining on the rocks and lighting up their shades.

  Timeless rocks at the water’s edge

  And timeless trees behind,

  Washed by a thousand raindrops,

  Dried by the wilful wind.

  A hundred caves by nature made

  In grey and brown and gold,

  And gold is the sun on the wooden shore.

  Then the purpling shades arise,

  Climb the hills till they meet the skies of azure blue.

  Now the vale is shaded and dim with mist and cold,

  Waters start reflecting stars,

  And night has come to Coal and Candle Creek.

  The Pauline Group, 21 September 1950

  STORM AT SEA

  N.P. Devir

  Soft sand under my feet

  And the thump of sea on the beach;

  Dancing lightning snaps its photographs

  Between fists of cloud and curve of sea;

  The moon drowns deep in dark cotton-clouds,

  Or from cloak to cloak goes brightly fleeting;

  But a greater thunder than the thud

  Of waves down on solid sand,

  Bumps against the eardrums of the air.

  BELLS

  Claire Binns

  Mystical peals from high

  Etherial regions bound

  In one confused profusion down they pour;

  Or take their winged course

  In exaltation leaping to the clouds,

  Where halo’d with delight

  In glory throned,

  They tremble in their radiance

  And set the ringing air afire

  And strike the chord of music in the heart.

  What soul but hears these peals

  And does not wish to fly

  Away from this corporeal mould

  And after them, way into the blue

  Flying with the lightest liberty

  Reposing in the air with ease,

  Uplifted by the fleeting clouds

  And drink deep draughts

  Of purest ecstasy

  And mystery divine.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  This is the most important thing,

  The whistling of the bird.

  This is the most lovely thing

  You are likely to have heard

  When death closes the door.

  But you prefer to ignore

  The humbler things’ play

  For the sensations on the floor.

  When the beam no longer comes

  Through the open
door,

  Echo will never have known you,

  Though she’s still at play

  With the song of birds by the way.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  She whom I cherish, as the morning light

  Drives with his staff the sheep of night away

  Grows thorns on seeing me, which judging slight,

  I lodge within my flesh the rest of day.

  As night’s flocks return below the stars

  Revenges make I to improve my pain;

  With neglect I’ll kill the faithless flower -

  I’ll never see her again.

  But when the painter sun again comes up

  I cannot stay uncoloured by my love

  But with him step in hope to light her face

  Who straightway scowls and frightens my embrace.

  So up and down like tides on walls

  My love rises with dawn, with evening falls.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  O, if I could break this box about my heart

  Wherein it stands like some green infant plant -

  And stretch my limbs, and make my green leaves start

  And be no longer cursed with all they grant,

  Then, how in the big earth would I revel far

  Playing hide and seek among the treasured stones

  And in the cheekless air towards some star

  Climb, like a conqueror over dated thrones.

  How would the busy world’s despised care

  Then be no longer purposeful to me.

  Should I not then great Eros be your heir

  And climb to take my filial rights from you.

  What have I to take from this fingering world

  But snapping where I naturally would have curled.

  ON WINGS OF SLEEP

  L.J. Pearce

  Thus mind to sleep …

  O mind!

  Mind is a falcon,

  Hunted and hurling,

  Wafted and whirling,

  Crying and calling,

  Bird-buoyant and soaring,

  Swinging and swirling,

  Stabbed-at and falling,

  Wounded and calling…

  Wing-wafted and wounded,

  Flinging and furling,

  Folding and falling,

  Frightened and friendless,

  Folded and

  falling

  Fathomless

  Falling

  FOUNDRY

  Roger Challis Brown

  With facts and figures running wild

  through minds already mazed with seeing

  sullen steel bend to relentless

  punishment, we slowly filed

  into the sun, and picked our way

  across the tracks to watch the steel

  splashed hell-hot into the moulds,

  and all its fury dying in a spray,

  of sparks like last year’s crackers.

  After the foundry (smell of scorched

  sand, eyes still dazzled in the light)

  the pattern shed, and there the racket

  stopped and we could walk in silence

  on a mat of shavings, where an old man

  shaped pine flesh about the word and planed

  the smooth curve of tomorrow’s violence

  with a steady hand, recalling

  that behind all violence of the mind

  lies this slow shaping in the silence,

  and around the bench the sweet pine shavings falling.

  RUSH HOUR

  Roger Challis Brown

  Well, that’s done, and now the rush

  for trams trains buses, now its push

  that counts, mad scramble

  for a seat, you’ll tumble to it quick,

  if not,

  you’ll stand, right

  down the centre, please,

  we’re going home, fares

  please, so hurry on there,

  on through town

  banks shops windows

  left behind, pubs close,

  home, quick we’re going home ……

  (Flung from a wave for a moment, bob here

  by the window, where one lonely orchid

  confuses the fresh senses with fresh snow and cyclamen,

  too much chill loveliness hurting the heart.

  Look! She is elegant, slim and decisive,

  Making her choice even as you watch,

  Holding a wisp of fine not to its glory,

  Knowing her grace … Oh delight! for they match.)

  tossed in the wash, spun

  through the town

  which one? paper! which one?

  banks shops windows

  close, now we’re going

  home, quick we’re going

  home …

  SWIFT SILVER

  Roger Challis Brown

  Swift silver there! The mullet’s leap

  Clean slashed the lake

  And threw along long shadows’ sleep

  Swift silver. There the mullet’s leap

  Left ripples, where the black swans keep

  Their vigil; deep reflections shake,

  Swift, silver; there the mullet’s leap

  Clean slashed the lake.

  LILYWING

  John W. Phipps

  He moved in shade, this lilywing,

  In shade, afraid of light.

  Dusk lover, echo of the night

  And hidden places, shadowing.

  He sang in whispers, lilywing

  In whispers talking of the dew.

  Dark lover, echo of the new

  And ages going, whisper thing.

  A rustle moth in feathering,

  A feathered touch of dawn

  And lilywindings, echo addict,

  And like an echo shadow shorn.

  SPARROW EYE

  Bill Belson

  With his intent sparrow eyes

  Prying out the heart of things,

  Crying: I will!

  I will!

  …

  Listen to the wind, brother - it is forever.

  It is tearing at the stones of your shelter,

  Ripping the leaves from the book of trees.

  It is coming down on us -

  It is bringing back the earth to dust.

  Hey, you, Sparrow Eye -

  Cut it out!

  You’re not God, you know!

  You can’t bore into stone!

  I’ll show you a little sheltered place

  Away from the buffet of the wind,

  Where a little bit of sunshine comes down -

  Where you can rest

  And shut your poor worried sparrow eyes.

  THE EXPERIMENTAL LIE

  Bill Belson

  A puckered smile went playing for a time, playing rebelliously round his tight mouth, tugging gleefully at the taut strings of his poker mouth. And then like a ripple it went away, and the whole situation was grave again - until the trap was sprung. And then, oh, the moon came out, and the ripples ran, and he laughed and cried out: “Caught the lot! The moon is out!”

  MAIN RANGE

  Wendell Simmons

  Beyond the river lie the white ranges,

  Moulded in gentle curves and angled slopes

  And shadowed dimplings where winds were born.

  A world remote and brilliant as the stars:

  Intensely white, with all the colours of the sun

  Caught up and far reflected to the sky.

  And soft a silence breathes from peak and valley,

  A silence that gently folds around the snowfields

  And holds them peaceful and in drowsy dreaming.

  A silence with illusive undertones

  That play upon the senses like the note

  Of violins, too high for human ears

  To gather into sound. And mocking one

  With haunting sweetnesses faintly heard.

  Life is here held captive for a
time,

  ‘Prisoned in impassive bonds of frost;

  And the spinning cycle of growth is motionless.

  Dead withered daisies cased in coffins of ice

  Remain the only sign of summer’s passing,

  And the land is servant to a new order.

  Vastnesses of snow lie drenched in the blue air,

  And icicles weave fantasy on the stolid rocks.

  This all shall be until the first spring warmth

  Seeps over the mountain and releases them,

  And the flowers and the colour will come again.

  The Pauline Group, 5 April 1951

  “For us, anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.”

  T.S. Eliot

  A MAN’S BEST FRIEND

  O. Sperling

  Goaty like dogs. Ever since he was a kid he had had a dog to play with - Mostly dilapidated mongrels that he found out in the gutter. And the dogs liked Goaty. He seemed to have some irresistible attraction for them, but maybe it was just that he chewed aniseed balls all day. when he wasn’t drinking.

  Like his dogs, Goaty was a mongrel. His mother was a quarter-caste aboriginal and his father could have been any one of thirty Chinese that breezed into town the February before he was born and breezed out again in March. He didn’t look like a goat;

  but his mother had named him Gottfried, and in town you don’t call people that; you give them decent civilized names. So everyone called him Goaty.

  Somehow he had avoided sudden death, in the form of racing timber trucks, until he was old enough to take a job in the mill himself. Then he settled down, got a new dog, and spent his four pounds a week on aniseed balls and beer. Drink never had any effect on him that aniseed couldn’t counteract, but when the big strike came and the latter commodity was out of production, he became surly and took it out on his dog.

  Now this particular dog was Joe - he called all his dogs Joe, be they masculine, feminine or neuter - and it had a pedigree. It was the offspring of two former Joes, judiciously mated. The pedigree had been drawn up in the bar by Goaty’s pal, Mitch, who could write a little. And with the aid of the assembled company they had drunk the puppy’s health.

  For two years Joe had lived on the same diet as his master, but when the strike came and money and beer were scarce, the dog took to drinking water. This proved his undoing, his constitution couldn’t take it. He would cock a leg and let fly at anything that stood upright.

  Goaty didn’t notice this very much, what with grumbling about shortages and being out of work. But one afternoon when they were talking of this and that, Mitch, by way of diversion mentioned “that noble animal and faithful servant, that elegant hound, so obedient and well trained.”

  “I’ll say he’s well trained,” said Goaty. “I don’t know how he does it. Keeps it all for the right time and place, most regular.” And just at that moment, Joe chose to mistake Goaty for a lamp-post, and relieved himself.

  “Why you filthy little bitch!” shouted Goaty, and the flapping of his wet trouser leg could be heard at the other end of the bar. “You bloody, filthy cur!” And he picked unfortunate creature up by the neck, effectively broke its back and flung it out into the street.

  “Damn you stinking pedigree!” And he flapped back to his beer.

  THE STINKIN’ LINCOLN

  N.P. Devir

  Steep, deep down the steps I gaze

  To people dimly through the haze

  From gloomy street through narrow slit

  To gloomier tables where they sit

  And writhing arms in speech the while

  Smoking, joking, voluble and vile;

  A smell breathes up of stagnant air

  And fat-smudged griller heating there

  And flesh cramped-in and over-hot exudes

  Its smell in mingling with their foods

  And through the hubbub comes a tinkling up

  Of boredom-spoon around a coffee.

  THE FUN FAIR

  Bill Richards

  Their faces puttied on the dirty pane

  The children sat, and neither said a word.

  Below, a web of lights, shone fairyland.

  The grown up faces filled the foreign train.

  And if we looked at all, we only saw

  A real beaut place to go on Wensdie night

  And have a time with Marge, or else a thing

  That blared along our nerves and left them raw.

  And if we looked at them, we only thought

  “Look at those bloody kids!” “Oh, the dears.”

  Or else - “Poor little brats, they’ll soon wake up,

  And when the bubble bursts, x will be nought.”

  It is for us. But through a darkened glass

  They catch essential beauty every day

  We see the smirking and the sneering face

  And get deceived by them. We never pass

  They need no code, for they possess the key

  And every kingdom is their common land

  They shun both sentiment and disbelief

  And we are caught by both and cannot see.

  What have we lost, who can no longer see

  In Mrs. Smith’s back garden, which remains

  Our ever-Eden that we ache to find,

  The phoenix upon the apple tree.

  What have we lost, who can no longer see

  Behind the built-up faces and the ballyhoo

  The blatant mug-lair noisiness that masks

  The void that once we filled, so childishly.

  IN BITTERNESS

  Bill Richards

  When your fair body and your lovely face,

  Your walking beauty and your ways of grace

  Begin to suffer from the slow decay

  Of your uneasy heart, turn to the glass

  My dear, and watch an awful thing

  Grow through the veils of flesh as they wear thin

  And then be certain - on your life’s last day

  Death need not knock: already he’s within.

  Dark Rain.

  When you came into me, dark girl,

  In from the night ad the silver sheets of rain,

  So wildly beautiful, my breath stood still.

  Why should your rain-wet face, your dripping hair,

  Elf-locked and stranded black on brow and neck

  Catch at me so, my dear, when I have seen

  You tender, or serene, and loved you well?

  SONG OF THE CHARIOT

  N.P. Devir

  Memory’s voices ringing clear

  Singing the song of the charioteer;

  Horses! Horses! wild and shying,

  Manes like flames in the the fast wind flying;

  Sweat from the shoulders blown like rain,

  Blood in the mouth from the bursted vein;

  Horses! Horses! blood-shot eyed,

  Bleeding nostrils opened wide,

  The chariot loud on the gravel track,

  Veins from the thongs along each back;

  The people cup their mouths and cheer

  As leather scourges make their sport,

  And the tails of the stallions make retort

  Blown in the face of the charioteer.

  Horses! Horses! wild and strong,

  Cut their backs with the knotted thong;

  Blood from the wounds drips and flies

  Like scarlet tears from sightless eyes;

  Wheel and axle, galloping feet,

  Smoke from the hub gathering heat,

  And bursts into tattered beards of flame

  Driving the stallions half insane;

  Horses! Horses! mad with fear,

  Out of control of the charioteer,

  Cheer and clap, mob desire,

  Faster and faster and faster yet,

  Golden stallions darkened with sweat

  Pulling a chariot winged with fire.

  Pebbles fly from the hooves and wail

  Sharp and white
like horizontal hail;

  Madness! Madness! plunging and turning,

  The chariot shaft between them burning,

  Blood where the stallions wrestle and rear

  Cutting the corpse of the charioteer,

  The people shout their raucous thanks,

  Crimson foam on the bleeding flanks;

  Madness! Madness! people laughed,

  The stallion’s down! the broken shaft

  Stabbed through the side of the charioteer ……

  Memory’s voices stutter and scream

  Trapped in the ring of a madmen’s dream,

  Flinging my mind from the blazing bier.

  CHARLATAN

  Roger Challis Brown

  Alas! My sorrow is for one who’s skill

  in making spells and fancies, philters, charms

  was boundless, till it served him over-well.

  A cheerful rascal, and a man well read

  in matters logical and alchemic,

  for which last virtue he has lost his head!

  THE ALCHEMISTS

  Roger Challis Brown

  Of failures, theirs was most magnificent

  who spend thrift, spent long patient lives

  in tireless quest, saw empires crumble,

  popes and princes vie for power.

  Whose thousand years of toil

  distilled strange magic from a madman’s dream,

  transmuted fact to wisdom, faith to act,

  but wrung from common lead no gold.

  PYRMONT BLUES

  Roger Challis Brown

  Blow the whistle early, I just can’t be late,

  Stop the double-decker at the stop by the gate

  See that Pyrmont bridge is open,; only one thing more,

  Switchboard, what about that number I’ve been asking for?

  Blow the whistle anytime, it doesn’t matter now,

  Nobody there, switchboard; no answer anyhow.

  Close the bridge to traffic, let a collier through,

  And leave me alone, O leave me lonely too.

  [ESSAY]

  L.J. Pearce

  The greatest thing about this moth was that he was unanimously and without the least little bit of resentment called by all moths in mothland the veritable and only possible prince of moths, THE prince in other words; whose image had lain secretly in the hearts of all moths both male and female since the beginning, and in dreams of both sexes had been covertly demanded of the creator as a reality, since his first rather too wayward thoughts of moths at all.

  In the bushland lay a hut - a hovel you might say, owned by a man, on second thought again you might say a beggar. Very, very poor he was, so if you asked men generally in what state they would least like to find themselves, they would say.

  “Like the beggar’s,” meaning this very same man that was out under the ragged trees and who dragged firewood for some feeble creatures of the outskirts of the town. Now how fantastic it was to all the fastidious members of mothland, and had they made worthy investigations, how unreal it would have been to all the best lights of the fair town sitting in the spendour of many faceted glass, which moths love as much as they, to discover the one and only beautiful prince of moths had chosen that hovel of the beggars as his dwelling. But of course the rich did not investigate at all and so deprived themselves of the knowledge of this miracle and of many more delightful ones in this story and in countless others made the clever world.

  If there is anyone whose eyes never miss a single thing it is the old fat world; and what a merry heart he has keeping his eyes open; and what to-do to keep his sides from shaking too violently. Before anyone else, before the most courageous boy had reported it and the wisest cripple had explained it, he was aware a bright strong girl was living with the beggar, quickly transforming his house into a comfortable dwelling.

  Before his daughter came to live with him, the beggar had no light. That was one reason why the prince, who was also the most learned of the moths had chosen it for his dwelling. There were other reasons which will only slowly reach our minds. Even before she had been successful in obtaining a lamp the girl had met and talked to the moth. He used to hang on the wall under his golden cape in silence while she spoke softly to herself in admiration of his beauty. And never had there been wings so perfectly cut, so beautifully adorned. And never had so sweet a face lost itself in wonder before one of Earth’s most wayward creatures. Earth itself looked more closely and not only surprised at the perfection his wondrous hands had wrought in what he recalled as rather a mindless moment, he was amazed and even a little frightened to find under the frail cloth of the light creature hanging in silence on the wall a complete and perfect nervous system trembling in response to the bell like sounds leaving he tongue of the girl.

  The fair minded Earth was struck with injustice. One of his creatures could speak, another equally perfect could not. He immediately gave the moth Prince a tongue and the knowledge of sounds in one gift, and one of his merriest chuckles passed under his sides. The Prince of moths and the girl, with not much surprise fell to uttering their admiration for one another. The girl told the Prince she was about to get a lamp for the hut at night. He said he would have to leave them. She promised she would never buy a lamp. Her father was very angry when day after day the lamp she had once promised to him was not there when night fell. His daughter easily forgot his reproach in the happiness of knowing the moth would stay.

  As knowledge of one another grew, the admiration of the two perfect creatures declared they loved each other. Earth, looking on, became grave, and when the old man was ready to strike his daughter if the lamp was not there that night, he decided to make one of those rare transformations that only the inescapable passes produce.

  Coming home in the evening with her string bag heavy with vegetables, sitting at the table opposite her father’s place, she found a young man as fine and strong as she herself. The moth had gone, and was on its way to the house that shone brightest in the centre of the town. Entering it through he window he found a lamp at last to stun himself on.

  The fair skinned young man, poorly clad, and the brown lightly dressed girl were married, and lived a long time in the hut which they made comfortable and lit at night to receive their friends.

  NOON

  Wendell Simmons

  The breathlessness of noon;

  A hushed expectancy -

  You wait for what

  O golden world?

  A soothing, sighing breeze

  To cool the fever there?

  Enchanter come

  To break the spell

  That holds you drugged in dreams?

  The whispers of the night,

  Her gentle tears?

  The Pauline Group, 3 May 1951

  THE BLIMP

  W.R. Richards

  The war is five years over - still he goes

  With stuck-out chest and bluff and hearty stride

  Down these civilian streets, between the rows

  Of peacetime houses, so remote from death.

  On Anzac Days and every other chance, his ribbons

  And his rosemary proclaim his loud-mouthed loyalty

  And on the days between he still must talk

  Of 0650, 1300 hours, and How We Did Things In The Middle East.

  “Men must obey their officers!” he said. “I wonder when

  That new campaigning medal’s coming out.”

  “I gave the bastard 30 days CB - “You’re too soft now.

  I don’t know what the Army’s coming to.” And “In our mess

  That slip was worth a quid; by cripes

  I wish I could be back.”

  Be back to where? To Crete, where stubborn men

  Died game and hopeless with no air support? To Changi

  Or Kokoda, or the Thailand track? O dear me no!

  He wasn’t there. He hadn’t thought of those.

  The things he meant were uniforms and pips,

  Ba
tons, and grog shows in the mess - being a back-line

  Hero, drill-ground martinet.

  Those were the days, indeed; and yet today

  I think at times he hears a quiet voice

  That drowns his boasting, fills his pompous head

  And brings back memories that he can’t forget -

  The knowledge of white crosses, or of unmarked mounds -

  Of men who came back maimed, or hobble still

  (Lacking a limb or two, or blind for life)

  Down these civilian streets, or who still stare

  At blank white walls in wards, or padded cells

  Five years, or thirty-odd from some war’s end.

  And evermore, when he is loudest-mouthed,

  Most the Old Digger, most the hearty chap,

  That one stray bomb goes off inside his head,

  The only bomb he felt in all the war.

  And when he scuttles back to here and now,

  Back with an unscratched skin and glory second-hand

  He tries to catch the threads of his life

  But finds his mouth forever filled with sand

  A LOVER’S LAMENT

  W.R. Richards

  Next spring, beside a southern lane

  The clematis will blow again

  Star-flowered, and scented after rain -

  But she will not be there.

  And on the hills the fallen snow

  Will melt away and never show

  Why one who walks should wander so,

  Or why he walks alone.

  And while the earth is roofed with sky,

  Lover will drown in lover’s eye,

  And both repeat the ancient lie

  That we no more believe.

  When love goes west it leaves behind

  An empty heart, a troubled mind,

  For what is lost you never find -

  And there is nothing left.

  [POEM]

  J.M.

  You have passed in these years -

  not dreamed, not dreamed -

  the daze of sunlight on brown arms,

  the curve of muscled body’s rest,

  not dreamed, these years, not dreamed.

  Your time of clocks not in the shell

  of seas in seas and ends that swell

  and shock and sound your thought -

  you have passed in these years

  the seas of sound that sing in shells.

  Too quiet now, too broken now -

  now still, now still -

  the running waves precipitate

  the time through which no sun will watch

  a hand now quiet, now still.

  CONVERSE

  C.J. Nommensen

  Prisoner of a world of doing

  Since doing must be done;

  Self-drugged with tiredness unslept

  Since how else may doing,

  Is merely doing, daily being done?

  Can thought be captured in aloneness,

  Truncheoned into aught

  But what a peopled solitude

  Unsought, yields and buries,

  Kills or never brings to birth?

  FASHION OF IMPATIENCE

  C.J. Nommensen

  Mellifluous Lois, let me no more merely sip

  Loveliness of lips, feel faint insipid fingers

  Dancing on my face where darkly lingers hair

  Whose fragrance you have hidden half denied.

  Let us improvise, design new compromise,

  No longer savour any favoured morsel

  Partly with a tempered partiality -

  Purge our moments of impatient prose.

  Have done with shadowed senses’ pale commitments,

  Relegate all pallid hesitation,

  Share impasto passion of the pounding surf,

  Possess plunging obsession and yielding liquidity.

  Let love be no half-hearted meagre hiatus

  We’ve stolen, departing and fading with passing of time;

  Urgent be nearness more eager and fervent,

  Love be our journey unswerving and time be our love.

  [POEM]

  Claire Binns

  My love was like a flower,

  Its colours dipped in fire,

  Breathing all the innocence

  Of a new-born summer’s day,

  Drinking showers of dreams,

  Wasting all its splendour in the air;

  You plucked that flower away

  And tore its bleeding petals,

  And spoilt them, so that now they lie

  Staining the weeping grass.

  SANDHILLS AT CRONULLA

  N.P. Devir

  Bracketing bracketing knocketing knock

  Clatter the wheels on the railway track

  Along the brick walls echoing echoing out

  Across the catchpoints bracketing back;

  Stress and steel of the bridgework plates

  Clamped in the clasp of bolt and nut,

  Woo and whoosh of the air, and the crack

  On the rails of wheel-rims sharply up.

  People left on the platform staring

  Lost in the loop of the carriage speeding,

  Flip and flap of skirt and brim, plucked

  By the hands of the wind, fast receding.

  Snipe through the flanks of a cliff, scarped

  In the blast and the holes of the drill,

  Rock to the sign of a name half-read, smudged

  By speed, bracketing, bracketing still.

  Yellow-dotted lines and walking legs

  Where the road loops long between shops,

  Squinting for the glare, thirsting,

  The sting of salt on my lips, across

  The park, the drinking-fountain dribbling,

  And gloat at that perturbulance of surf!

  A sudden glitter where a wave swells

  And breaks! an explosion of foam, upwards,

  And the long dull thumping, thumping.

  Past the swimming-pool, past stairs that drip,

  To where we came that night we two

  And sat, watching the spray across the light

  Driven by the night-wind, cold and wet.

  Along this dwindling boomerang of sand

  Now smudged by haze and factory smoke

  Solander Cape was vast and weakly vigilant,

  Moon still down, lost all shape to gloom,

  Except its mighty presence jutting there.

  Move now along the shell-grit sand,

  Down the broken seawall … no seagulls here …

  Where a storm had battered down the blocks.

  Aching shins and sweat beneath the arms,

  Creeping dots are people halfway to the Cape;

  Look at the sea, slavering and wild, where

  Waves smash on underwater rocks, mightily!

  Look too where the sandhills shimmer

  With green-tuft hillocks here and there;

  Look where the bubbles seethe and burst

  Left by a wave’s withdrawing tongue!

  Look and exult and let your senses ring …

  Driftwood and seaweed, and a ship’s boat

  Against the sandbank, spineless and a hulk,

  Washed up some night perhaps, her sailors drowned.

  Move on musing, inwards from the beach

  Through this gap where lorries go for sand,

  Great white ridges, arching, swept clean

  By winds, sloping down like thighs,

  And a crow somewhere that smells me out.

  Look at the time. Clouds in the eastward

  Forming, bulbous through the haze, sheep

  Of the sky with dirty fleece …

  Slip back where the sand

  Gives, headache from the glare, aching eyes,

  Stumbling down the slope, much cooler now

  With the wind rolling from the foam, blowing

  Brushwise through my hair, and kissing me.

  Tiredn
ess quells the poet in me, there

  Where the foaming grovels, and the shells!

  The sea is slack like an old hag’s breasts

  Sucked dry of its milk by the sun.

  Knock on the rails, train comes plunging in,

  Caterpillar face and window-striping sided

  Gape of a doorway, wait for the jolt, press

  Of back against the seat, refulgent air

  Is fogged with sound raining on eardrums,

  Frothed like foam, bracketing, bracketing home.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  It is returning, the Everlasting

  Look at the clouds in the sun-passing burning,

  The green grass spread with the clover whose perfume

  Memory loves. She sends out her dancers.

  Here we are, dressed in our trades, our tools thrown aside,

  Flinging our limbs where we will; the blue sky above.

  We throw ourselves down on the ground with eyes closed

  Drinking the sweet scent of the tender white flowers;

  The moon begins glowing.

  All is a dream. The savage conductor is there,

  The car owners ever unknown passing by

  The towers where the rich unknown live standing by.

  How grateful we are to you Everlasting for always approaching.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  You are at one table

  I am at another

  Only a few feet between us

  Filled with awareness of each other.

  I devise a hundred ways

  To make it shoot into speech

  Yet I dare nit take a step

  Over the absurd gulf between us.

  Am I afraid of being taken for the assassin

  Society hunts to save its daughter from death?

  Or do I fear I shall find you unworthy the death I can give

  Unready to enter wideawake into the new realm of womanhood?

  I carry the memory of your seated figure

  Your plain lace dress

  And your hair like cut wheat heaped above your brow.

  FERRY

  Roger Challis Brown

  Dazed with the sun, and too much loving,

  feeling the sharp breeze colder

  than the burning sand, your dark head

  heavy on my shoulder,

  we move only through the long day’s wonder;

  so we hear the surf, the throbbing engines

  and the music drifting

  from below as one theme only,

  though we know how soon

  the bell must bring us slowly

  shuddering into tomorrow

  with a swirl of longing at the bows.

  Now the sun …

  Now, for an hour or so, the sun breaks through

  the brooding clouds, the rain which dulled first light

  gleams on the pavements,

  and two sparrows try an impromptu

  pirouette on air for my sole pleasure.

  Drugged with the clean-washed air

  I am content to let the sunlight lead me

  down the morning’s gold so carelessly.

  SEA SONG

  Wendell Simmons

  A song is sung out there in lonely spaces;

  A song of wind and waves

  In deepest caverns born,

  Where fathomless the inky waters lie.

  A song that swells up through the giddy greenness -

  To break upon the clouds

  In thund’rous melody,

  And echo through the canyons of the sky.

  A lullaby crooned soft on sunlit beaches,

  When earth, serene, is robed

  In haze of blue and gold,

  And diamonds dance the waves, and winds are still.

  A war-cry flung with pagan savagery

  At pitted crags of rock

  All pounded by the sea,

  And bleeding there pale rivulets of foam.

  A love-song whispered low in twilit hours

  When ripely glows the moon.

  - A merry dance piped clear

  On laughing days in spring when earth is gay.

  A symphony that takes unto itself

  The splendour and the awe,

  The quiet and the might

  Of all the world; and sounds majestically.

  DIES IRAE

  W.R. Richards

  We who were once cocksure are shaken now;

  We had the answers taped and pigeon-holed,

  But someone cruelled the questions while we slept

  The goodies and the baddies have been switched.

  The tribal deity we bought and sold

  Has turned our temple tables upside down

  Has changed blood money back to blood again.

  Perhaps you noticed at that wedding feast

  The wine return to water, or beside the sea

  Last Sunday, picknicking, you turned to find

  Instead of brimming baskets, five bread rolls

  And two pathetic fishes? Have you heard

  That strident cock that crows in double time

  When you toss 3d to the bloke that’s blind?

  You know the one - they say he lost his sight

  In that last war against Samaria.

  They say this phony peace has sprouted swords.

  And what is worse, they say the risen dead

  Have all returned to death, replaced the stone

  And won’t come out for us - and worst of all

  We’ve all gone blind again. Spring-spittles dry!

  Bling gropes for blind. The tides of light

  Have shattered through our souls and swept away

  The sands of which we formed our certainties,

  A whirlwind beauty blasts our soft brains numb,

  The wind is in our teeth, the wind-blown rain

  Has caught our breath away and we are dumb,

  The vaster values have come home to roost.

  The Pauline Group, 14 June 1951

  SINAI

  Bill Belson

  I behold the ungreen bolt-upright savage lunge of the land,

  The silent, protecting, cold eruption of earth from earth,

  And beholding, am still.

  I behold stone,

  Strung with impotent longing

  And a jargoning small heart frozen hard with pity and soft tears,

  Enshrined too close to the earth for pride,

  Too high for peace.

  I behold, and I am still.

  BORONIA

  Bill Belson

  Here is a rugged god in the hills

  And Boronia,

  And leaves that hang in the green winter

  And gnarled old trees.

  The rocks by the river sing;

  Slumber and sing,

  And the locusts sing.

  The rocks by the river burn.

  The river is old and bosoms trees

  And weeds.

  Cold in the heart,

  The river is green.

  In the ways of hard hills,

  Boronia;

  Boronia serene

  In the rocks

  By the river.

  OFF ADEN

  Bill Belson

  Only the birds fling

  And the still sand glares.

  Bare in the heart

  And hard.

  The eye shrinks

  And the spirit sings;

  The soft age in me

  Shudders and sings.

  PAEAN OF LOVE

  [D.W.H.]

  The night is black, if blackness is length.

  The night is long, if length is pain.

  The night is deep, with the depth of misery,

  For those who love, but are not loved.

  Fraught with fear and bitter memory,

  The stones of darkness must be trod.

  Weep, pilgrim, weep, and in weeping hope,

  For
love may come, should all else die.

  But night is my soul, and my soul is sin,

  The sin which grows like sewered rats,

  The sin whose punishment is expiation.

  I have loved, and to love is sin.

  I walk through the valley of shadow

  And know not joy, for thou art with me.

  [POEM]

  Athalie Fenton

  When dusk seeps softly

  From the moist soil

  To mingle with the slowly settling twilight,

  A silence conceived in lengthening shadows

  Flows forth to dance her gliding ballet.

  Under the laced boughs

  Of the mimosa tree,

  Where the last pale sun-shaft

  In ecstasy quivers,

  She advances with the velvet suavity

  Of honey-drunk butterflies,

  Hovering low over peony blossoms.

  Her every motion is a theme for music,

  Intrinsically tuneful

  Like the heaving sea -

  A movement from the eternal symphony of solitude

  Poignant as dissolving memory.

  This melody of gesture possesses

  All the grace of swallows swooping,

  All the subtlety of lowered Lashes,

  All the sinuous, lithe vitality of a body essentially fluid,

  Swaying aloofly with virginal allure.

  The poetry of her weaving limbs

  Beckons mutely

  With the spell of mystery,

  Seduces a man

  With the rich promise of a heart’s fulfilment -

  Total oblivion in beauty.

  So, aspiring to dream of half-remembered heights

  Singing pinnacles of high achievement -

  He plucks the roses from the lips of silence

  And suicides with her in the sea of night.

  PAINTERS IN

  Roger Challis Brown

  Today we burnt the sofa; twenty years

  of tinkling cups on placid afternoons,

  long winter evenings by the firelight

  with the small flames shivering, caught unawares

  on hot coke. We salvaged what seemed good;

  the cloth would do for dusters, and the springs

  might come in handy somewhere.

  Though it was full of nails, we kept the wood.

  All over the house, the same;

  the inkstains near the fireplace may be gone

  next week, the scribbling on the walls

  must vanish. Nothing will remain

  except the coloured blocks I tumble

  through my fingers, thinking how

  first fires go out, and watching

  as the smouldering ashes crumble.

  THE STORY OF JENNY CREEVY

  N.P. Devir

  “Jenny Creevy,” he said, “Jenny Creevy. I’ve never told you the story of Jenny Creevy, have I? that was many years ago.”

  Old Pop Creevy said that to us, me and my brother Morgan and my younger brother Dommie, and that was many years ago too. He had come down the Old Wharf Road one afternoon in his horse and cart and made his camp on the river-bank between the Log-Wharf and the Goods-Wharf. In the old days punts used to come up from the railway station further down the river but it’s all done by lorries now. I remember how he come up the hills to our cow-bails where we were milking and our dogs barked and sniffed around him and how he was dark like a gipsy and had a dirty grey beard. He said hello and my father said hello and he asked my father did we want our tanks cleaned, a new way without wasting any water. My father said no he didn’t think so and if the drought lasted he would be able to get down and clean out the dirt himself because there wouldn’t be any water to waste then. That was funny because he had got down once before and got stuck and we had to cut the tank open to get him out.

  We three boys weren’t used to strangers so we went on milking while our father talked to Pop about our cows and the drought and the war that had just finished. Pop said his two sons, Wog and Bill had been killed together at Gallipoli and that his wife was in an asylum from worrying too much about them. Pop offered to buy some milk but we gave him some without money and he invited my father down after tea for a yarn and said bring the boys because he liked the look of us and that we were good workers. My mother said yes we could go down if we promised to be good and never robbed birds’ nests again and chopped firewood for her without complaining. We were very excited because we lived a fair way from the town and didn’t meet many people and Pop looked interesting and frightened us too with his beard and his bad teeth.

  We were shy like animals at first and waited for our father to go over first and start talking but we gradually got closer and closer because we wanted to hear what they were saying. My father was telling Pop about when he was young, he was a milkman down in Sydney and how one morning the horse bolted and knocked a man down. As soon as my father stopped talking Pop told us in his young days he used to work on a ship and how one night a man fell overboard and they looked for him but they couldn’t find him. Then they told funny stories, not taking any notice of us, but we knew they were trying to make us laugh and we did.

  We used to go down every night and sit around the fire on a log, never speaking a word, and then one night Pop told us about Jenny Creevy. It was one of those very dark Autumn nights when the moon had gone down early, just after sunset, and my father said he was too tired to go down and talk to Pop. We were frightened of the dark, living so far from the town, and because our mother was frightened too. She often told us that some people had walked out at night saying they were just going for a walk and they were never heard of again. But we went down because Pop was interesting and our father said we would have to learn to be men. I remember how we thought the sally-wattle was like a big animal and young Dommie thought he saw the prickly-bushes move towards us. But we forgot about being frightened when Pop was telling us his stories. Then his voice changed when he started to tell us about Jenny Creevy. We said afterwards that we thought he was going to cry, only that men never cry.

  “…Many years ago,” he said, “Jenny was a cousin of mine and she always wanted to be a nun but I never met her. This all happened up on the Wangurra river before I was born. Our parents would often tell us about it and their voices would tremble. They were nearly all Irish people up there then and all good Catholics. Jenny was a very good one and some people say she should have been a saint. When my grandfather died he left the farm to my father because he was the youngest and he always lived in the house my grandfather built. There was a lot of bitterness at first but it gradually died down. Jenny was a daughter of my father’s eldest brother, Michael Creevy, and he lived on a farm about nine miles away. There was a boy older than Jenny and he was drowned one floodtime trying to swim his horse across the river where the old ferry used to be. Jack, his name was, big and good-looking like his father. They didn’t find him till the flood went down, he was half-rotten by then so they buried him where they found him. I never met him either, this was all before my time.

  “They say Jenny saw the Blessed Virgin once in the church that’s used for a school now. And she saw Mary Magdalen too but no one believed her because it was in the cemetery but not in the Catholic part. It was outside the fence in the bush where the graves of some blacks were. She said she was going past on her way to put flowers on her grandmother’s grave and she saw Mary Magdalen standing on a black-baby’s grave by itself that had no headstone or anything, only a heap of bush-gravel and some big stones along the sides. Mary Magdalen told her that she was a good girl to think of her grandmother and God was pleased with her. But no one believed her because the black-baby wasn’t a Catholic. And Mary Magdalen told her that her brother Jack would be drowned next big flood and he was as I said but still no one believed her.

  “Jenny was fifteen at the time I’m telling you about. It was one Good Friday and my father and mother went further up the same ridge that o
ur house was on to where my Auntie Hilda lived. They went up at night after milking and took my older brother with them. Bengy his name was and he was the bay at the time but he’s dead now. They left my auntie’s place about nine o’clock at night. Remember the time, nine o’clock! They walked down the ridge till they got to the slip-rails near the road. It was nearly all bush then but it’s pretty well cleared now. It must have been very lovely at night when it was just a track through the bush. My father was carrying my brother, and then both together my mother and father looked up and saw that our kitchen was on fire. We lived in one of those old style houses with the kitchen out the back by itself like a big barn and it was joined to the house by a landing. The whole house was made of slabs, up and down like that bails of yours, and it had a shingle roof because the whole place was built with an axe practically, except the floor-boards. They were cut in the saw-pit near McCarthy’s Lagoon, but it’s been filled in now.

  “The kitchen was alight from end to end, all blazing. They thought they must have left some wood burning in the stove and hot coals fell out onto the floor and started the fire. There were two big fig trees at the end of the kitchen, taller than the kitchen, and they could see the flames behind the limbs. The whole shingle-roof was burnt out ad there were only the rafters left and they were burning and the smoke was red underneath. My father handed my brother to my mother and ran down the road like a madman but my mother wasn’t far behind. They ran around the back but there was no sign of a fire. There were no flames and no charcoal and no smell of smoke and the kitchen was still standing. They went inside and the stove was stone-cold and no sign of a spark at all. They couldn’t have been seeing things because there was no moon that night to trick them. It was pitch-black like tonight. It’s just a mystery. I don’t believe in ghosts or fairies, but some things just can’t be explained. How that kitchen could seem on fire to two people and yet not be on fire at all is just a mystery.”

  Pop just sat there thinking and didn’t take any notice of us and took his pipe out and spat into the fire. The coals went black and there was a sizzling sound and the coals started getting red again. We could hear the mullet in the river jumping and dogs all were barking because they were frightened of a fox and they were pretending they were brave. Pop just sat there and seemed to forget all about Jenny Creevy. He was breathing quick and hard as if he was getting wild because we were still there. Then he started talking again.

  “I never met Jenny,’ he said, “Because I wasn’t even born at the time, but they say she was very beautiful. I have only seen her grave and it has wild-flowers growing all over it but the rest of the cemetery is all bladey grass and paspalum. It’s just a mystery. My mother and father went to bed after they made sure there was no sign of a fire but they stayed awake all night talking about it. The next morning Uncle Mick … he was Jenny’s father … rode up from his farm and told them that Jenny had been burned to death the night before. At about nine o’clock! I saw the headstone, “In loving memory of Jenny Creevy, Burned to death on Good Friday, 1847, aged 15 years 4 months, May her soul rest in peace.”

  Popo just sat there and didn’t know his pipe was out and we could tell it was late because it was cold and a mist was settling on the river. We didn’t like to go but had to and we said goodnight but Pop didn’t hear us because he was thinking about Jenny. My mother was waiting up for us and she said we couldn’t go down again because we wouldn’t come home early and she was worried about us being away at night by ourselves. That night I dreamt I met Jenny standing on the black-baby’s grave with the bush-gravel and the big stones and she told me to be always good and say my prayers and I would go to heaven when I died.

  Next morning Pop was gone. There were only ashes where his fire had been and bits of paper and a tobacco tin there and the marks of his cart. My father said he thought he heard him going back up the Old Wharf Road before daylight, but he wasn’t sure. Anyhow Pop was gone and we never saw him again, but he’d be dead by now I suppose.

  NATURE

  Claire Binns

  The wind, it heaves not human sighs,

  The rain, it weeps not human tears,

  The sun, it smiles not human smiles,

  For Nature is implacable.

  Then let your winds my passions cool,

  And your silence my tumult still,

  And teach me only how to be

  Stoic like you.

  DAWN

  N. Kirkby

  Earth paused in her breathing,

  Plants swayed not, but quivered,

  Oozing, in trembling expectancy

  Odours known only to mortals by morning,

  And old ghosts, breathing with pleasure,

  Slowly marched away towards the West

  As they heard the sounding trumpets of the Dawn

  - And the Sun arose!

  Wittily, light played on sleeping faces,

  Tantalizing the lazy with warm kisses,

  Caressing the energetic into wakefulness,

  Pricking the well-near dead with argent arrows,

  Until the opening eyelid, casting free

  The weak but heavy-lying hand of sleep

  Released the spirit to the wonders of the Day.

  DE MORTIUS

  W.R. Richards

  Today made sense. This morning lizards ran

  Quick-silver like, across a rotting post,

  And one great flock of pigeons played at love

  On roofs, and down the air, across the ground

  With sudden flash and flutter, dragging wings,

  And ants rushed past with mad and metal feet

  On some instinctive errand, urgently;

  And starlings guzzled berries overhead;

  While looking on, coquettishly demure,

  The flame tree dance a ladylike striptease,

  Casting her crimson petals as she swayed.

  These things made sense today.

  These things will still make sense when lizards run

  Across my rotting limbs, quicksilver-like;

  When pigeons lecher round my peeling bones;

  And ants bear off my body, piece by piece,

  To feed their hungry young ones in the nest;

  Starlings befoul my head, drop berries in

  The pods of my hulled eyes, and O my dear,

  The flame tree will not know what dancing is,

  Until you lie beneath, coquetting still.

  Yet still they say that life is heartbeat, breath -

  You can’t kill life. These things outbalance death.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  The birds with many joy-nursed notes

  Sing their songs around my ears.

  Inward through my window floats

  The brilliant tide to banish fears.

  Crisp like frost one songster’s chime

  Crackles sleekly in my thought,

  Using all my wits to rhyme

  Is barely to its pace is wrought.

  One reciter measures slow

  The beginning of his song,

  Then impatient at the flow

  Whips it furiously along.

  The pigeon’s hollow chest proclaims

  That he’s of lyric song deprived,

  That no memory he disdains

  For which lament can be contrived.

  Lastly the dancing waiter of the earth

  Setting before us dishes most enjoyed.

  The willy-wagtail, little mint of mirth,

  A ship of song in heaven’s ocean buoyed.

  VAST SMALLNESS

  N. Kirkby

  We must gamble on the Moment

  For many things are lost or gained

  Upon the Moment;

  The playful insincerity of the lightly given kiss

  May, in the flash of Instant, and the quick growth of Moment

  Become a yearning Passion-vow of Spirit;

  Or the Old Man, taking a stroll

  On a late afternoon,


  Wandering, may stroll beyond

  The Roads of Life …

  All in a Moment.

  The Pauline Group, 22 July 1951

  AUTUMN-AGE

  N.P. Devir

  Autumn is my sad season,

  Perched up on a backyard railing,

  Sad as the tombstone hills for no reason,

  A graveyard world, the dusk-light failing;

  The eyes of darkness propagate, as evening hardens

  Into night, a crown of light in night’s black hair,

  The winds are dumb, a world of withered gardens,

  A smokestack gaunt and blackly bleeding there.

  Autumn breeds disquiet of mind,

  Of Egypt past and Europe in decay,

  Of suns burnt out, whole systems whirling blind,

  And night has sooty wings that shadow day;

  This silent ridge of household lamps,

  Like stars to vaster spheres through shrapnel pricks,

  Lonely as bugles calling to empty army camps,

  And tongues of love have guttered on their wicks.

  Autumn is upon me, sad as men with empty sleeves,

  In childhood my people gone without me,

  Autumn is my sad season, when I feel the leaves

  Of my being are falling down about me.

  CONCENTRATION CAMP

  N.P. Devir

  If you have smelt of evenings burning bins,

  With rag perhaps and smell of smouldering straw,

  And roasting pigs, then you were close to this:

  The flesh of men alight inside their skins.

  I have seen hogs go mad, with bloody froth and tusks,

  Gashing dogs and biting sucking-pigs to shreds,

  Ripping out the belly of a farrow sow,

  And in his wake, red scraps on golden husks;

  I have heard a pack of dingoes and a calf at bay,

  Heard it bellow, and almost human scream,

  Have run with lanterns down to rescue it,

  And seen the tattered carcass bleeding where it lay;

  I have seen a frenzied stallion kick

  A gelding down and trample him to death;

  Have seen a dugong on a beach, driven ashore

  By sharks, and sick, as dying men are sick;

  I stood one morning high up on the rocks

  Watching a thresher-shark attack a whale,

  Stuck to his sides like fins, and in the evening

  The seagulls feeding there in flocks.

  Yet when these images recede, this thought will remain,

  That for sheer ferocity, for death’s accomplishment,

  There is no creature in all the world can rival

  The death devised for men by the human brain.

  SCHOOL OF LOVE

  C.J. Nommensen

  They call you Lotus-blossom,

  Tall and stately maiden;

  I’ve called you Lois only,

  Would have you all my own.

  They see you in the daylight

  Loveliness in shade

  I find you in the night-time

  To make your petals mine.

  I’ve drunk from deep blue pools,

  And tasted honey lips,

  I’ve swum in silver smiles

  Around your mellow isle.

  Each vision of your face

  A crystalline surprise;

  Each syllable I hear

  A purpose for my ears.

  Lost in you I’m found,

  Leave me never now;

  Change my poor attire

  For satisfied desire.

  EPIGRAM

  Bill Priestley

  Lips may only be distinguished by

  Imperceptible minutiae.

  Why is it then, O gentle Jesus,

  My mind on one pair only seizes.

  DAY

  N. Kirkby

  To the close Man of Business in his swivel-chair complacency,

  Seated in his sanctum, Ordering, Checking, Scribbling;

  Scoring a bargain on his mental tally-stick,

  While times office-boys go tip-toe by …

  … Five days must go to reach the next week’s golf.

  … The Poor, or Ambitious, or the Aspiring-Poor,

  Greyly trudging workward through a rosy light

  To once again think bitter thoughts

  In the ruck of Circumstance

  Cast defiant eyes

  At tall-topped buildings.

  The Pleasure-Seekers sleep, nor see, nor hear

  Until the hour comes when tree-leaves glimmer gold

  And the short green knives of grass are dry of dew.

  Yet the Seeker-After-Pleasure may once find

  A Day come forth when grass is shriveled brown to yellow

  And vaunted Thrilling Moment be accursed.

  BOOTMAKER

  Roger Challis Brown

  I called for my shoes;

  they’d last the winter,

  but longer than that

  would be a wonder.

  The bootmaker’s fingers

  picked over the shelves,

  High heels beside hobnails,

  Sixes by Twelves.

  Ranked there in battalions,

  some shiny, some old,

  some hinted at secrets they held,

  but none told.

  Small shoes for slim ankles?

  Black suede should go well

  with blonde head… perhaps.

  I could not tell.

  The bootmaker followed

  my careless eye,

  he wrapped my parcel,

  his voice was dry:

  “Her shoes, when it comes

  to choosing a lover,

  are as good a sign

  as any other.”

  Not for us the final rout…

  Not for us the final rout,

  the shattered figures stumbling back

  to shrink from pity and to bear their shame

  through the long bitter season of defeat;

  nor dizzy failure, with the prize,

  exploding like a long-watched rose-bud

  on the senses, jerked away

  before the mind could comprehend, hands seize,

  instead we limbered up exposed ambitions

  and withdrew in silence to prepared positions.

  [POEM]

  L.J. Pearce

  To rocks that tremble with the heavy wave

  Where sits aloft a hollow cave

  Apollo on a starry night

  Took gentle Creusa for his deep delight.

  Making her listen to his famous lyre.

  He filled her heart with tender fire.

  Her robe untied desire ran free

  Like bubbling springs between the god and she.

  Through the noises of the rolling main

  Their laughter leapt like yellow flame

  Soft Venus mingled with fair Creusa’s mind

  Eternal thought the purest bliss to find.

  Apollo left her in the shady morn

  Rising on purple steps to strike the corn.

  Creusa conscious of a god as mate

  In rosy gladness passed her father’s gate.

  MOUNTAIN WOOD

  Garth Everson

  Up Coricudgae’s thickly wooded sides we’d climbed

  To the expanding ridges high

  Still, in the afternoon air

  And chill of autumn …

  Towering gums with dripping bark

  Touched and tangled with the sky;

  While flattened, moist against the earth, there spread

  All along the hill and up the slope:

  A glistening layer of wild buttercup

  Reflecting as the ripples of a pool

  The watery lights that dwell below the trees,

  Condensed from silvered slippery leaves

  And subtle dews of autumn.

  FOR THE CHILDREN …

  Garth Everson


  “A cat sat on a mat”

  (So I’m told).

  In winter time, you’d think it cold

  For a cat

  To sit,

  Just on a bit

  Of mat.

  “The cat saw a rat”

  And that is that, -

  At least,

  For the rat:

  A feast

  Though, for the cat.

  “A cat sat on a mat”

  Or some such spot.

  In winter time you’d think it cold

  For a cat.

  But it’s not.

  The Pauline Group, 17 April 1952

  NIGHT WALK

  Ian I.S. Sacey

  The shadow from the tree

  Stretching away in grotesque shape

  Gives a dim sensation of beauty.

  The shadows of us move across the wall;

  Moved by the force of bright car lights

  Comes the image of an elongated dog.

  Black pasted on dun, hard on dim,

  Car lights and magic movement in a new dimension.

  That sliding, black-cut pattern,

  The willow’s overhanging wispy green,

  The cubist dimensional shadow,

  Or the white clouds whirling in the sky,

  Strike a chord in my brain that won’t be explained -

  Click… like a card in a magic lantern.

  GOES MAD

  Jeffrey Miles

  Poetry is the best value for your money. Some

  times it makes you blue and very sad. But

  it’s the one the best you say, O I

  like that but I don’t understand this modern

  stuff yet. Next time I’ll look the diction

  ary up. And then it gets you you

  remember it right across the back of your

  neck when youre cleaning your teeth or sit-

  ting in a Redfern tram or waking in the

  bumping night. One rabbit-killer and

  boy you’re gone. Hazy crazy hopping boy

  mad you really go mad. Stick your

  chest out till you yell till you’re yell –

  ow in the face not mellow but bull –

  full. Grab the down-handle-barred greased

  bike snort the piston pedals Catherine

  wheel the cranks and steam through hiss the

  suburbs chimneys hills hopscotched streets

  chimneys and suburbs. Hit the city dodge the

  buses skyscrapers barrow-men middle-aged

  man. When striding Harbour Bridge the

  up the double somersault over the smack

  the green swims the water. Splash but you don’t

  hear it you’re singing and you’re already

  Nicholson to the fishes. And the song goes

  bubbling away to the sun snakes down to

  meet blue and blot the day is white. You

  hold up all the tall the ferries you’re the

  nightingale chested traffic cop. All on the

  rocks you send them there they go. But some are

  dazed and walk up the north shore you

  don’t know where they’ll finish. Lash out for

  land and in one you’re climbing up the

  dry the Quay and the newsboy offers you a

  paper. He must be is the mug to sell the

  news and poetry is the best buy better buy.

  THURSDAY NIGHT SWING CLUB

  Jeffrey Miles

  Blue Boy by Gainsborough,

  reckon he’s too thorough,

  says the Swing Club radio.

  No sir, we’re all set to go,

  rocking and hocking with “After You’ve Gone” -

  clarinet by Wild Bill Davidson.

  Mister Gainsborough you’re too pale blue.

  Master painter, if you really went to

  Get good and mean low-down blue, well

  Listen to that old man Graeme Bell

  Going crazy with mad piano.

  Boy, he’s pouring it out like red-hot manna.

  Ho there, you paintings on the wall,

  you ought to be right here in the hall.

  Say hey, old man Laughing Cavalier

  you couldn’t sit still if you could if you could hear.

  You’d throw away that lace collar and starch,

  start stomping to the “Goanna March”.

  Hot diggety, how can you stare and smile

  behind that funny curled moustache while

  the jazz band keeps on bashing away?

  Little Boy Blue there just say

  how can you stand in those old high shoes

  keeping still to the “Basin Street Blues”.

  Jump off the wall and come on down,

  that drummer man is going to town.

  Come on Cavalier, little Boy Blue,

  can’t you hear the beat rise in you?

  Can’t you feel the jazz swell in your heart?

  Yes man this is what I call art.

  BOREDOM

  David A. Haig

  Sitting erect, head bent low,

  Cramming, cramming, without exercise,

  Bursting of knowledge of those

  moulding and rotting, never to rise.

  Reading and learning of warlike times,

  Squatting with propped-up eyelids,

  poring over drear dead rhymes

  Fearing for the future

  Studying so as to earn

  A living at some monotonous job.

  It matters not if you yearn

  To be elsewhere.

  Sitting erect, seeking culture,

  Dazing erect over some new art,

  mind slipping the leash

  Suddenly to awake with a start.

  Time, time slipping away

  The overcrowded mind, faltering

  Overworked, lacking the power to stay

  Geometry! Mind lacking perception

  Brain, exhausted, straining to understand

  And what do we gain? -

  No wonder the demand

  to be elsewhere.

  Sitting erect, eyelids low;

  Youth and vitality hiding its bloom;

  Swotting, studying, and battling

  In a dingy ill-lit room.

  Amidst obscurity searching for truth

  Battling with confusion; losing

  For what is true appears uncouth.

  Hidden and dusty, mouldy and damp

  Is that what we struggle to learn.

  This culture a sham!

  No wonder you yearn

  To be elsewhere.

  Standing erect. Head held high

  Youth has at last escaped its prison

  Glorying at last in its liberty

  A man fresh and hopeful, arisen.

  Again has youth learnt to think

  To sift truly the true from the false

  At the fountains of beauty he rushes to drink.

  Bored, depressed, hopeless and beaten

  He studied and searched until mad.

  The horizon at last has lifted!

  And you are glad

  You weren’t elsewhere.

  WINTER MORNING CAMP

  David A. Haig

  The black-brown, steep-scarred soil

  Gaunt boned claws the coming light,

  Gleams in wind parched tongues across the curving hills.

  The earth eagerly her lover waits to meet

  And view the morning with delight.

  As the drifting fog of mist uplifts

  The placid water ruffles to the rustling wind.

  The shrill voiced crane to the God of day doth call

  The smoke from yon cream-bricked chimney curls

  A cheery call drifts with the rising wind.

  The white clad mistress; frost

  Crackles and sparkles, crystalline beneath,

  Smiles upon the golden river of light

  Reflects, refracts, retracts; then sli
ps

  Into the absorbent turf, her waiting wreath.

  Now arising from the hairy blankets

  I, the embers of my dying fire shall stir,

  The billy boils and gum smoke mingles in the brew,

  And as I smoke the ruddy warm-wood briar

  The early waking plovers whir.

  My swag in hand, beside the broken camp

  Bathed in the adolescent light

  I find my soul, commune with God,

  Turn to the waiting road, past the bleating lambs

  And onward go towards the coming night.

  SILENT CLARITY

  N.P. Devir

  Silence is not solitude I said

  Thinking of Sartre, of the totemite

  In silent sympathy with earth and dead,

  Of Parain’s philosophy, the deep quiet

  Confidence between us, she and I, beyond

  Where normal hearts and minds respond.

  Thinking too that some pervasive instinct,

  Prevalent with meaning, was the only,

  Language needed; a thought worded that linked

  Her silence to my silence and neither lonely;

  Her reply of “All that glitters is not gold”

  Cut like the ice-wind, incisive and cold.

  My words had failed, the silent clarity

  Of speechlessness obscured by anger,

  For she defiled my meaning in disparity

  And as we parted in the street, hunger

  Of the heart was mine, as pity was, to brood

  Alone, in silence and in solitude.

  FROM “AZ OROM ILLAN”

  Arpad Toth

  Translated by Marie A. Kuttna.

  Pleasure passes: to her.

  Farewell yet shines in her eyes,

  Like fading music are her sighs;

  Her golden tresses lightly stir.

  I hardly trust that she was here,

  So faint and distant is her face:

  Like slight ripples on the surface

  Of a still lake, made by a tear.

  Was she here? Oh Pleasure, Pleasure …

  One minute more, one second more!

  Say life still holds some magic lore,

  Say that I have not yet lost the treasure …

  Pleasure passes: mark her flight.

  Farewell trembles in her eyes.

  Ceased is the music of her sighs …

  Her tresses are of silver-white.

  [POEM]

  Ruth Hansman

  I lifted, laughing tensely your lids,

  and you glimpsed for moments our world,

  But bitterness and hopelessness put experience’s blindfolds over.

  I can never think when it is windy;

  my thoughts blow about

  and everything is insecure.

  I feel the best I could do

  would be to shut out all the senses

  and let go.

  Eyes reveal worlds,

  and ever so often I am compelled

  to know their mysteries.

  I find conventions agony

  when sense-silks suggest a web.

  I feel my mind as hard as a planet

  in the skies of myself,

  and my senses stars

  sparking for ignition.

  AFTERTHOUGHT

  Roger Brown

  The next meeting

  of the Group

  will be held

  on Thursday 22nd May.

  All members are invited

  to send in

  their work

  for the sheet.

  The Pauline Group, 22 May 1952

  TUNNELS

  S. Green.

  Have you ever, with eyelids closed

  and eyeballs encrushed by impressed thumbs,

  delved into some unknown region of obscurity?

  Have you seen there, strange indescribable things? –

  long tunnels with chequered sidewalls, –

  circular shape coloured green then brown? –

  long strange tunnels proceeding ad finitum.

  The tunnel continues but the vision is ended

  A blackness overcomes it.

  Reflect …

  … Life is that tunnel …

  Only look forward …

  Life is perpetual …

  Thoughts, only thoughts … only thoughts …

  ………… hopelessly pleading …

  UNTITLED

  S. Green.

  I see in the future

  a world of broken-down decrepit fords,

  creatures with hands and feet

  without their bodies,

  arms all twisted …

  results of meanness

  and agony

  and war …

  ALLTHIS I SEE.

  I see at present a

  world of systematic citizens

  slowly degenerating into stereotypes

  chronometers …

  in place of hearts …

  crying their individualism.

  But they are units in

  a huge calculating machine. They are

  LIVING BUT DEAD.

  I see myself

  and see catastrophe

  attempt

  to draw me from myself

  my oneness

  my individuality.

  And I am PLEADING …

  … HOPELESSLY …

  DIALOGUE POEM

  N.P. Devir

  Who won the war. Who won the war?

  Yes, who won the war. Which war?

  That’s the question I put before.

  Nobody won the war. Nobody won the war!

  This levity of yours I must deplore,

  That’s not the answer I’ve been asking for.

  Death won the war. Life is not deceased,

  We two live at least, and millions more.

  Death won the war. Death is dead

  And we’re alive I said. Death won the war.

  Nations always lose, nobody else wins wars

  That’s my opinion of it, and I know yours.

  OLD MEN

  N.P. Devir

  Every night without a break

  These old men to the library come,

  Silent and alone, refugees from bleak

  Unhappy evenings in some exacerbate room.

  Shabby, always shabby, with eyes

  Of capture, unreleased, like animals in zoos,

  Poking among the ruins of goodbyes …

  And dirty ankles show above their shoes.

  On coats and collars a man’s bad mendings:

  Pity pervading every stitch they wear:

  Deserted, broken-hearted, living eviscerate endings

  Of their lives on a library chair.

  Reading about Equador or Napoleon Bonaparte

  A page or two and stopping, minds dim

  With other things: destroyed, depart -

  ed autumns when other people knew them.

  Visibly they sicken, dying without fuss.

  Some who really want to die reaching in their pockets

  For glasses: eyes somehow suggesting puss,

  Red and retreated in their sockets.

  SONNET

  Lionel Pearce

  Here in my lonely room I sit so late

  That like a cloud-surrounded star my light shines out

  Through the unconscious dark so rich in sleep

  Where too you lie, oppressed by his swart beams.

  You cannot know that I do think of you,

  Of that sweet head the soft white pillow holds,

  Which I have seen but for a wink or two

  But still remember as though ‘twere my own name.

  What power has that round dome around my heart

  To set it worshipping, the shrine unknown?

  That careless of the prayers that to it climb

  I stay with it so long in thought devout.

  For true it is, fair faces are more k
nown

  Than thoughts within them into favour grown.

  FROM “THE COUNTRY SHOW”

  Lionel Pearce

  I.

  Beyond the open window groove

  I saw the farmer’s daughter move.

  O such girls should be your wives,

  You men that live in city hives.

  They can clear your heart of dust

  And teach you love as well as lust,

  As a brood on mother’s breast,

  Their bosom drowns a man’s unrest.

  If you would each dawning day

  See some loved eye give ray for ray,

  Then marry someone country bred,

  And take the peace that is their bed.

  The city eye is often grey.

  The city bed takes peace away.

  The city manners all are vain,

  And in a year mean only strain.

  The way of parties, pictures, plays,

  When two must tread it, quickly frays.

  The travelling by bus and tram,

  The drinking coffee, eating jam,

  Drains while youthful years are there

  The power to love, the need to care,

  And both with seedy minds but scoff

  At others who are better off.

  II.

  I wandered further on the field

  Where still no sound of play had pealed,

  And found a river’s bank below,

  The gums who shade on earth bestow

  Like quadrupeds of watery home

  Some little boys with water shone,

  And with a query on my way

  Renewed their dappled splashing play.

  For through the general shade there came

  Through opened leaves a yellow flame

  From sun who kept his heavy way

  Still far short of middle day.

  A LOVESTORY

  Marie A. Kuttna

  Hope went to my head when my spring had started,

  I forgot the might of time and circumstance.

  All I remembered was the promise of pale twilights -

  the promise in the rustling leaves overhead.

  The heavy, empty hours which then passed

  between the last decision and the act

  pulled me constantly towards my depth:

  and soon I lost all the longing to fly.

  And now the end.

  It does not bring distress:

  it only leaves me alone in the empty space

  of my own consciousness.

  But I deny regret, and the thwarted joy of self-pity.

  Perhaps I shall be happy now it ended -

  at any rate less tormented

  by doubts, and the recurring traces

  of moods that once turned my head and the hope.

  RINGBARKED

  Jeffrey Miles

  Eroded my brain …

  Once the lush

  tree-covered hills

  rich and fertile

  and golden fruit

  of our mellow love.

  Decayed and desolate now

  the wind and the rain

  stir my red dust

  bodiless and drifting

  since you left

  with time’s ringbark …

  A SERENADE AT DAYBREAK

  Arpad Toth

  Translated by Marie Kuttna

  Daybreak. The dense filth of the town

  Is paling. To the east, in the mellow distance

  A fresh canvas is spread over the expanse

  Of the sky by the great artist, the dawn.

  With silvery pencils he draws a fanciful cloud

  And he dreamily paints it with liquid blue yes …

  Slowly the night turns into open skies

  And the country sheds her covering shroud.

  Darkness, the ugly nocturnal vest

  Peels off the treetrunks without a sound;

  Shivering in the cool depths of the forest profound

  Dawn, rustles the Mystery, the Forest.

  Now before she reveals the shades and scented air

  She waits for the rich old sun, who, afire with desire

  Will flash a yellow comb across her thick green hair.

  But here, imprisoned by narrow thoroughfares

  The grey daybreak is barren of delight

  The desolate night-flowers, the gas-light

  Has shed its petals of pale orange flares.

  A faint outline of a tree here and there

  Waves like a blind torch in the dark,

  As it stands in some small, dusty park

  Or hides behind the corner in an empty square.

  You, Anne, are asleep. I walk alone the ways

  The lonesome, sad ways of the sleeping town,

  My only companion in this weary dawn

  Is that silent music which phantasy plays.

  It strikes the chords of forests, skies, of your smile -

  It elaborates these motives as I go …

  Oh, how I should like to halt under your window

  Playing a serenade of my sad exile.

  I would give my heart to be the instrument.

  My heart … its serenade has a joyless refrain …

  It might remind you of some vague, gentle pain

  And indefinite longing: chaste and reticent.

  You may forget it when morning will arrive,

  But till then, innocent of it in your sleep

  Drop a tear, and, unaware that you weep

  Pity my forlorn life.

  THE BIRD OF PASSAGE

  David Haig

  Who likes for the bird of passage?

  Feels jealous of his beating wings

  Longs for unencumbered freedom

  Without knowing that it brings

  Loneliness no mortal heart can hold,

  The emptiness of loveless life,

  The staleness of a spirit no longer bold,

  A desire no longer met

  Save in the lonely mind

  In whose memories refuge, he vainly seeks

  The haunting holding days of old,

  When offcast betters held his soul

  And lent their purpose to his being.

  He loves no more, his lonely heart

  Wakens to its vicious folly

  When the clinging bonds were shattered

  And he cast away the purpose of his life.

  TO STOCKTON BEACH

  David Haig

  Before I came into this rocky world

  Till long aft I have gone to everlasting sleep

  This sandy headland, its flag unfurled

  Has rebuffed the unceasing challenge of the deep

  Whose creaming breakers, the roaring echoes’ start

  Off the unending barren shore

  Unto the infinite distance I stare, wonder fills my heart

  And I long to be no more.

  Why should I fear the coming death?

  Tis but an eternal land whose frontiers, length untold

  Opens to me at my last gasping breath

  And solves the greatest mystery I behold.

  Glad am I that I not God

  Who knowing all has nothing more to find.

  His labours ne’er finish: despite his sleepy nod

  The reward He gives his sons, He has himself declined.

  The emotion runs, no power to tell

  Itself and makes me whole again.

  Some shackling piece of me has fell

  Something of myself here I leave, and this pregnant strain

  Shall stay with me, be my lasting comfort.

  Long as I may live, shall I see

  This Saharan view; unexpected and unsort,

  Stockton, blessed by God, stretching into eternity.

  SWEET HUNTER

  Jeffrey Miles

  Flow gently, sweet Hunter, among thy factories,

  Through half-sunken mud-flats and mangrove-swamp trees.

  My Mary sits fi
shing by thy sluggish stream

  For Burns’ Scotch haddock - disturb not her dream.

  Thou four-o’clock whistle that streaks through the sky,

  From chattering machine-shop to coal-crane on high,

  Ye hoarse-hooting tug-boats on the harbour down there,

  I charge ye - disturb not my wharf-fishing fair.

  How sterile sweet Hunter, thy neighbouring lands,

  Far marked with the scars of thine industries’ hands;

  Where houses and drab streets with boredom turn sour,

  There daily I wander during lunch-hour.

  How pleasant thy banks and the grey town below,

  Where, wild against buildings, the sooty smokes blow;

  There oft as brown evening swirls on the city,

  The black-arched rail-bridge shades me and Mary.

  Thy coffee stream Hunter, it brings down the soil,

  From up in the valley where grim farmers toil,

  Past my bare-footed Mary on the wharf with her sport,

  But leaves all the mud and chokes up the port.

  Flow gently, sweet Hunter, among thy factories,

  Escape if you can, out, out to the seas.

  My Mary’s a-scraping the scales in a dish -

  Flow gently sweet Hunter, and don’t scare the fish.

  The Pauline Group, 3 July 1952

  [POEM]

  John Croyston

  “What is life?” I cried.

  What is life?

  The shuffling old man with the crown

  Of withered silver, clawing at the age

  old books, lying like nuggets

  in the lands of the lost

  couldn’t tell me.

  Was there life in those printed capitals?

  A message, a lesson?

  The kiss of death wanders wantonly,

  the battening butterfly sucking juice

  from living flowers.

  He didn’t read the books, he sat,

  his ragged head on his withered hands

  and his sockets sunk their eyes.

  My hand was at my head,

  I felt the bones, the clock at the climax

  of a dream, and the worlds failed, and I left.

  I saw the bloodied mist of the sunken sun

  rise like souls of slaughtered men

  staining the drunken crenellations

  of the buildings buttressing the sky,

  and I saw the crude stones glorified,

  and I stood, cold, petrified.

  The devil descending black flack wings of night

  quenched the vapours from the

  from the near-sleep-seeking children

  and then the stars with their feeling splintered light

  glittered brittlely and threw down jagged spears

  that clove the mantle of the night.

  The hollow walls moan the echoes

  of the sterile voices, voices calling, meaning nothing,

  the tinkle of far-off bells calling

  a people unknown to a church unknown,

  singing hymns that aren’t for me.

  I feel my pipe and stuff the weed.

  The hot furnace feebles its life,

  glows, pulses in its light

  and I blow a long smoke, an airy plume

  of nothing, that flees the flagrant chatter

  biting like many, nibbling like many

  little insects, at the core, the hollow rind,

  the rind that echoes the vibrant voices,

  voices bounce and go.

  I blow a long smoke

  And try to trace it, but it flees me too.

  The Midas mist from the bowl

  radiates and warms. The memories

  and the recollections smell so sweet,

  and I don’t care about the voices.

  The goldeyed monsters gobble

  at each others tails and glare frigidly

  ahead, the long worm of man

  crawls on unavoidingly and

  my pipes gone out.

  THE TOWN

  Translated by Robin Pratt

  The shore is grey, the sea is grey

  Beyond the little town.

  Upon the shining roof-tops the mist is pressing down

  And through the silence roars the sea

  In infinite monotony.

  In spring the woods are not alive

  With birds’ sweet cry.

  Only on Autumn nights, with harsh farewell

  The wild geese southward fly.

  A bleak wind ripples through the grass

  Along the seashore as they pass.

  Yet all my heart belongs to you

  My hometown by the sea

  With youth’s enchantment evermore,

  Grey town, grey sea, and lonely shore,

  You smile on me.

  SALUT A PRUDHOMME

  S. Green

  I.

  As the tide comes in, and each breaker

  Pounces down upon the one before it,

  Beating the sand, crippling the cliffs,

  Loose and shapeless, knelling forms -

  It seems that these are the oracles of death.

  How significant is inertia.

  II.

  Horror not for horror’s sake.

  Not poverty, injustice, wrong-doing,

  Meanness, agony and retribution

  For their sake alone;

  But theme of decadence and degradation

  Designed for better means,

  For purification through suffering

  And trial by What is contrary.

  III.

  A person uninterested in poetry,

  in music, in the music of poetry,

  in painting and the pictures painted by poetry

  in poetry and the chiseled sculptures of music

  in this, the unity of art

  is not concerned with life,

  itself conveyed by art.

  MY HUSBAND

  Athalie Fenton

  A husband is a loathsome thing,

  Christ knows

  Half froze,

  Staid gait,

  Smug pose -

  The weightiest freight

  Of life; and yet the shaven pate

  Contends Christ rose -

  Christ rose from husbands left as Satan’s bait?

  Nay, but mine cannot sin:

  He’s very sure Christ walks in him.

  SUNSET

  Athalie Fenton

  The sky was red

  that night,

  And the twilight heat

  flung itself

  hungrily

  through the sullen windows.

  I lay and dreamed

  under the red of that sky

  of what might have been

  between us,

  Cleaving together

  as the tired day heaved

  its last blind sigh.

  And dreaming alone

  I was content

  so that the argument of the spend thrift clouds

  died:

  And left me centered

  in the dove grey

  of a sky that had spent its red.

  ARCHAEOLOGICAL PIECE

  N.P. Devir

  At the corner of the park, where

  Dark of hill and dark of storm-clouds meet,

  There the headlights strike and flare

  Along the wall and so flash out.

  In our minds we are alone. A bolt

  Of thought descends, left high and solitary;

  The image, like meteors iron shows sign

  Of having travelled through distant darknesses;

  Dead language beautiful on undecipherable stones.

  That is how my minds works: something clear

  Suddenly out of confusion, then sheer descent

  To darkness, extinguished beyond expiation.

  Call it revelation, call it inspiration, or discovery:

  I can show you fear
in a handful of wordS …

  In the beginning was the word

  And the word was God

  And God was indestructible;

  In the beginning was the word

  And the word was an innate

  And the image was God;

  God is infinitely indefinable,

  Only wind through broken stables.

  All dejectitudes are mine, are mine, are mine.

  Fragments. A ruined city

  Full of sanctity.

  Fragments of some perfect former thing,

  Now worth this, now worth nothing,

  Yet worth the attempt to reassemble,

  To reconstruct, complete again, but never able.

  Pity, the pity in the rubble.

  Time’s livid final flame burns

  Unextinguishable among everlasting ruins.

  A SOUL IN THE DESERT

  David Haig

  What is the price of a whim’s fulfillment?

  I did not realize, save until now,

  For in the true light I see,

  The tortured path in the rock-strewn sand.

  Can feel the jagged flesh of conscious thought.

  Festering ‘neath the summer sky,

  Alone in the blistered noon-day’s radiance,

  My mind twists in parlous straights

  To ease my raw, red, dry-parched soul,

  Bites the hot, dry sand, chokes, and waits

  For the soothing, lulling hand of death.

  Dreams of the past, old joys return

  So shall I with my hot and foetid breath,

  Even though my lonely soul is lost,

  On the wind rolled dunes of sand

  For the dry eternal sun to burn.

  MORNING AFTER

  Roger Brown

  Then to sit down to breakfast with the sun

  already moving with hot hands about the house,

  the weight of warmth along the shimmering road

  pressed on the curtains in a shaded room,

  the faint breeze stirring in the sweetness of a day

  which you must take with some honey and some milk;

  best to sit there in silence

  with the snick of clippers on the lawn

  for music. Soon they will begin.

  Their questions, like the small brown butterflies

  about the massed lantana, have no urgency;

  one flower, one answer, is much like another,.

  Still, you must fly a lazy phrase

  Which dips in answer as it glides

  Into the mind’s next garden, safe from swish of net.

  Anticipate their query: “Dave was there,”

  - the fluttering hands above the breakfast things

  give you no sign - “And Michael too.”

  They comment as they always do;

  “Well that was nice. They drove you home?”

  (the music fading to the engine’s drone,

  the night drawn into a whirl of comets

  by the winding road…) “Oh yes.”

  Then with the coffee they must ask:

  “And who was the most beautiful?”

  (half-jesting, and half-fearing some Snow White

  may offer you the Princedom of Suburbia,

  their seven impish fancies delving

  in the harmless truth - hand them a mirror)

  So in reply: “Elizabeth wore blue”

  (the swaying grossness and the jumbled whirl

  of eyes and sighs and thighs blown in a breeze

  of sax and drum are swabbed away by morning;

  you must take the glittering fact,

  with stainless tweezers, place it on the tray

  of their opinions, thus … Elizabeth wore blue)

  Until you brush aside gloved probing minds,

  start from their gleaming table and with certain tread

  walk into the day’s hot light, though not away.

  Then to sit down …

  TWO POEMS

  Roger Brown

  Wide through the walks of loveliness I went.

  I looked on every side with eye askance,

  Afraid some greater wonder would my soul elude

  Than from the works but lightly seen I drew.

  Here, the great forms of poesy proclaimed

  What high ambition had assaulted man,

  Whose tragic destiny I knew so well,

  So much diverse from it. Next, painting came,

  With magnitude as vast as stones can hold,

  On one another piled by lavish hands,

  And colours that extolled their user’s brush

  Till pale the rainbow seemed, the sun all cold.

  And lastly sculpture showed his trembling hand.

  Form upon form stood wrapped in sanctity.

  I felt here man was freest from the role

  Of serving man for some insulting fee.

  Here with my force and thought I longed to stay.

  But, the great Master came and said, without

  “First you must go to find in deepest hell

  How all divine is what you briefly know.

  Then without me you will enlarge this hell

  With works that equally pure wonder held.”

  ________________________

  Make clear to me, you Gods, my sickened mind

  That yet in your own world feels dizziness.

  Lift off the weights that close its starving eyes

  That they may see what you have put within.

  Such forms approach me as restore my power

  To sing for moments like an ailing bird.

  They disappear and every way is one.

  What my will is, I with grudge must learn.

  First loosen from your hands your jealous tools,

  Why keep so long a servant without use.

  Teach him at least what metal he must use,

  To make him stoop at once when you are clear

  You need the virtue that his making moved,

  And cure his wounds with renovated sight.

  IN AN OLD ROOM

  Jeffrey Miles

  Bearded Old Man, Sun, seeps through cobweb-stubborn windowpanes

  (bars of gold on the floor, dances

  On the gold-dust air, dances…)

  Throws up blind, nocturnal things, cringing from the light:

  Scared portraits turned to the wall, drowned hat boxes, rusty

  (Red-beard creeps across the buckled boards…)

  tin trunks - the years’ hoarded dusted hoards.

  You can rub out Time, initial it with your little finger.

  Next meeting …

  Last Thursday of term, August 7. At 151 Elizabeth St.

  The Pauline Group, 7 August 1952

  PSYCHOLOGICAL PIECE

  N.P. Devir

  Paul who is shy comes home late

  And drunk for the wedding

  Mistaking silliness for humour, indiscriminate

  In effusive kissing.

  Karl who is lawless cannot differentiate

  The purposes of meeting,

  For him they are all to mollify his insatiate

  Desire for drinking.

  The witty, uninvited sailors go early

  And successful.

  Failures gaining courage remain, vulgarly

  Discussing everything;

  After washing up grow sentimental over absences

  Insisting all went well.

  Byron does not circulate, in alert silences

  Abstracted in their midst,

  Uncertain between envy and disgust, lament –

  ing the lack of taste.

  The children with immense capacity for enjoyment

  Playing apart

  Silent Grishkin does not know the overproud

  Are easiest hurt.

  Jessie is a slut; she understood the subtlest word

  The sailors meant;

  The party is the thing, she sacrifices dignity

&n
bsp; For entertainment.

  Helen goes to school, thought of trigonometry

  While serving cakes.

  Her father who tells tall stories is rudely bored

  When anyone else speaks.

  IMITATION OF A.E HOUSMAN

  N.P. Devir

  Children, children whom I discover

  Pause in your playing:

  Here is a gun, a quick revolver,

  Faster than arrow flying.

  If I should pull the trigger, thus,

  Pointed beside beside my eye,

  The sun would smash as shattered glass

  And you, dear children, die.

  ANDRE MAROIS’S “ARIEL”

  Julian Woods

  I had not hoped to feel such strain

  Of saddened joy, my heart pounds - let it bear

  Emotion’s pitch to think that sometime here

  On this unreasoning earth of death and bane

  One lived like he among such worldly pain.

  So gentle, fearless, mortal without peer!

  So I leave undisturbed a single tear

  That wells from deep within my brain.

  Oh, why not let another Ariel roam

  The ways of men within my pleading sight…

  Sweet life and make this world his home.

  Once more, I search for him with new delight.

  But around, the blue topped hills, the stones and streams

  All say that Ariel is but dreams.

  DUMB SENSE

  Julian Woods

  How can a running line confide or word

  Express, the truth and glory in a scene

  When even thought we master so is heard

  In transit, strange to that our brain did mean,

  And if the mountaineer did ne’er retell

  The awe and pain of heights that skywards tower,

  How locked is then the secret of the spell

  That binds our soul with beauty to a flower?

  So in these little days of touch and sight

  And sound, wherein our closer being dwells,

  I should not haste to set to words this might,

  Though tongue is confident that it excels.

  To wonder and be mute is better sure,

  Than spoilt perfection in a song impure.

  PITT STREET 1AM

  David A. Haig

  Ah, dark and lonesome solitude.

  Lift high thy choking leaden cloak,

  And free once more the happy mood,

  And once more let me laugh and joke.

  This vale of tribulation

  Within whose dark and mouldy portals now I stand

  Wasted, empty, hollow, damnation.

  Man lift high thy friendly hand

  May comradeship again be free

  In this black desert, slag for sand

  Man again full of sight to see.

  Oh lonely city. Dark dank and blight,

  Houses jumbled close and low

  Choking locking away the light.

  Hollow putrid cess trap I do not know

  The filthy beams of moted sun,

  Stranger upon stranger, each to each unknown

  Empty, foetid, odorous, stagnant one

  This part of life I do disown.

  City of colourless colour; crowded goal

  Where weak and tortured men doth moan

  And hope seems no avail.

  Oh for the sweet soft lip of earth once more.

  The drover and his lowing herd, a quiet Goodday,

  The ploughman and his straining team. A store

  Of men who’ll stop and pass the time away.

  Give me again my multitude.

  Not useless melancholy man on show

  To crowd, eager, hunger, and crude

  Who all his intimate intimacy doth know

  Whether life’s failure of attainment of its goal.

  Hence to country, sweet, I go

  With beauty to rejuvenate my soul.

  NIGHTLIFE

  Jeffrey Miles

  Planets go stomping round the sky

  to a handful of stars dixieland jive,

  lazy seven stars strum, blow blues in the

  night is a dim honky tonk, a low dive.

  Whos that there in the corner

  the old moll sucking her beer?

  yellow painted moon, shes past her prime -

  lonely, buy her a drink or shed a tear.

  LYRIC

  Jeffrey Miles

  Say baby you know the way

  railway stations stand dopey dazed

  and dumb when express trains fly

  through whistling a streamlined

  hoot that’s me when you stride

  past and pat your hair.

  Like stations I want to say

  Come back here.

  How a cracked record spits away

  the same tune the same tune crazed

  the same tune and needles try

  to stop one mighty chord behind

  the stutter which wont hide

  and wont stop like your hair.

  Like needles I want to say

  Come back here.

  THE COMING OF NIGHT

  Roger Milliss

  The last saffron rays of day’s brief messenger

  Cast in the west a bleak light

  And long leering shadows lick the earth.

  Dark browns and greys devour delicious hues

  Of blues and greens that, in the sweet caress of noon’s warm sun,

  Sparkle ebulliently with sheer delight of life.

  The air grows chill; you feel the sodden touch of dew soaked grass

  Where once you bathed in sun-kissed fields.

  From hollow corners where in day the darkness hides,

  Hearse-of-all-night emerges, banishing light like Tarquin.

  Light flees before its foul oerpowering waves descending,

  Save where a plaintive owl flings its querulous notes

  To the highest heavens.

  “I SHALL REMEMBER THIS ABOVE ALL THINGS”

  Roger Milliss

  I shall remember this above all things:

  your smile flowing like sunlight

  through the pent-up clouds,

  breaking the drear monotony of life.

  Your laughter, echoing clearly in my heart

  like church-bells on a Sunday morn,

  sweeter than a fluttering flute

  Your full red lips, sun-chose to sip

  The nectar from the loveliest flowers;

  Your long awaited kiss -

  I shall remember this above all things.

  SLICES OF LIFE

  S. Green

  I.

  The time obscure, the slippery slope, the slow rising lake,

  Companions slip and fall to death as I from my dream awake.

  It was not I that had to die;

  It was the other men.

  I could not die when they died in the dream

  And wake to live again.

  II.

  Whether it be a doorstep

  Or else a sheet of paper,

  Whether brown or white,

  Yesterday’s or today’s,

  There is no greater satisfaction

  Than that

  From cutting one’s own

  Slice of bread.

  AS THE LAST LINGERING HOURS

  John Croyston

  As the last lingering hours of day

  elude the longing night,

  like the worded lips that part

  like the blood that leaves the heart

  you go from me.

  Your furled fingers

  like lily-leaves

  enfold the filament of my love.

  And when words stray

  the lilies play,

  and toss their heads at the mute

  wind-fall-fruit.

  A WIND MUST BLOW

  John Croyston

  A wind must blow

 
; a tree must bend.

  on this principle

  our deaths depend.

  The flowers bloom

  their faces fade,

  we all follow

  death’s dead leaf glade.

  The sickening sun

  lays it down,

  the sweetest face

  contains a frown.

  But when the flower

  at last has gone,

  its scent remains

  with us for long.

  GUEST SPEAKER

  Virginia Woolf

  ‘Be silly, be sentimental; imitate Shelley, imitate Samuel Smiles; give the rein to every impulse; commit every fault if style. Taste and syntax; pour out, tumble over; loose anger love satire, in whatever words you can catch, coerce or create; in whatever metre, prose, poetry or gibberish that comes to hand. Thus you will learn to write…’

  Next meeting - Thursday September 18

  Probably last meeting for this year

  So be …… There

  The Pauline Group, 18 September, 1952

  SOLICITING THE SUN

  Athalie Fenton.

  A little self-pity

  Doesn’t do you any harm;

  In a big bad city

  A little self-pity

  Sounds fine in a ditty -

  And works like a charm.

  A little self-pity

  Doesn’t do you any harm.

  A spot of ready cash

  Doesn’t do you any harm

  In a town so brash

  A spot of ready cash

  Aint spurned like trash -

  It’s manna and balm,

  A spot of ready cash

  Doesn’t do you any harm.

  A bed for the night

  Doesn’t do you any harm;

  Now get me right,

  A bed for the night

  May sound quite trite -

  But it keeps you warm.

  A bed for the night

  Doesn’t do you any harm

  A coat of mink

  Doesn’t do you any harm

  When it’s swim or sink

  A coat of mink

  Puts you in the pink

  On a gentleman’s arm.

  A coat of mink

  Doesn’t do you any harm.

  A ring on your finger

  Doesn’t do you any harm

  Oh no, by jingo,

  A ring on your finger

  From a bloke who wants to linger

  Saves many a qualm.

  A ring on your finger

  Doesn’t do you any harm.

  A place in the sun

  Doesn’t do you any harm;

  When you’ve had your fun

  A place in the sun

  Means the race is won -

  Turns ditty to a psalm.

  A place in the sun

  Does no one any harm.

  RAIN: SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  Roger Milliss

  Rain:

  and on the window pane

  the scattered stain

  that brings the day its bane,

  confines the narrow day’s domain.

  Gale

  and the lustful wail

  of the withering wind assails

  my sheltered ears, and the hollow groan shall prevail

  of the hapless trees blown bizarre and frail.

  Gloom

  through the solemn air pervades the room

  and the murky light consumes

  the dying bloom

  of flowers and their faint perfume.

  Blent

  in my brain are the God-sent scent

  of musty books;

  and the negligent

  throwing of coats and the insolent

  tilt of cast-off hats, and impertinent

  gamps, and impatient

  capes and the impudent

  stare of goloshes and the permanent

  Rain

  and the scattered stain.

  FIVE DREAMS. OR, METRE OF MEANING

  N.P. Devir

  The first time I dreamed, there was a thunderstorm.

  Lightning gashed from a cloud and ricochetted

  From water and struck me between the eyes.

  I was in a subterranean place where darkness

  Gurgled its idiot languages about me.

  Or were they bats in a cavern off Sicily?

  Or lost souls of soldiers and drowning seamen

  Singing with gunfire and seabells in broken choir?

  Or half-formed thoughts in a primitive mind

  Fragments of sound, striving to break the silence?

  I could not tell. And then the sight gashed

  From my eyes and ricochetted from water

  And entered a cloud, wriggling its tail.

  The second time I dreamed I was under anaesthetic

  Falling tremendously towards an oblong light,

  Which hummed and screamed as a winch, and shattered.

  Surgeons in the glare dissected me to the final cell

  Of existence which they split and a little sphere

  Rolled forth, down a chute into a bottomless well.

  It fell for as many years as a single bird

  Would take to carry away the Sahara, one grain

  A day, and each day an aeon.

  The friction of eternity on my soul

  Wore it segment by segment to a nothingness

  Suspended in the dense air, and only darkness

  Gurgled its idiot languages about me.

  The third time I dreamed, Christ’s wounds opened

  Their lips and said, “Son of man if you doubt

  That I am god put your fingers where the nails

  Have been.” I stepped through the casement

  Of his side and in a land of strange dimensions

  Wandered for as many years as a single bird

  Would take to carry away the Sahara, one grain

  A day, and each day an aeon.

  My human embryo, in my mother’s entrails

  Swaddled, dropped through the casement of contrition

  Into birth again, and Christ the arch-priest said,

  “Son of Man was born to suffer in a wilderness

  Of errors”. And choirs of dead soldiers sang.

  The fourth time I dreamed, I stood in the railways

  Of Antarctica and from the glacier polewinds

  Sabred me, who rapped at the heavy door.

  Mephistopheles, the arch-priest held his lantern up

  Which was my head, held by the living hair;

  And through empty sockets, the bright ignited brain.

  My own lips said to me, “Son of man,

  Go! before winter comes, on your bitter journey.”

  A blizzard broke containing the sobs

  Of hurt mastadons and drowning seamen; the high priest

  With my jawbone for a knife cut my heart

  From its ventricles and threw it in the well

  Where it chased a frog and copulated.

  In my fifth dream I was Socrates

  Awaiting the hemlock-hour of my heresy.

  Christ’s face came from the wilderness of mirrors

  Which circled its idiot images about me

  And said, “Son of man, on such an afternoon

  I submitted to the insult of human crucifixion.”

  Then from the bottomless well, a telescope reflecting darkness,

  Galileo paused in his paternosters, said,

  “A man’s life is worth what his mind is worth.

  Recant for the living are wiser than the dead.

  A storm broke brimming with rain the sobs

  Of hurt mastadons and drowning seamen; I drank

  The poison and died back to wakefulness.

  ICATARUS

  John Croyston

  We two flew together.

  Minds on dual wings

  that sought the sun,

  till too ambitious

  like
a lone boy

  long ago who

  slid down the channeled sky

  and left a life, a love

  to mourn for him.

  crying wasteful cries

  beating ineffectual wings

  till like the night’s

  ingesting of the day

  he sank beneath the sea.

  IMPOTENCE

  David A. Haig

  If I could grasp

  The gambit of my life,

  Else put my hand on the face of God,

  If the wavering pen could but clasp

  The blazing fire of illumined thought

  Then I could sink and die

  Live and be content.

  But the pen is slow

  Turning only in the narrow bounds of consciousness

  The thought runs on, oerstrips the grains

  Blazing across the firmament

  Then fades a dying spark in expiation;

  The pen crawls on

  Vainly seeking the light’s recall

  Falters slinks and halts

  Limited, stricken with frustration

  To find its impotence.

  THE DAMNATION OF BYRON

  Jeffrey Miles

  Oedipus means Clubfoot - our lord’s leg was lame.

  Oedipi when spurned by mothers

  Sate the Eros loving others,

  Which should explain his fame.

  TIME AND THE LOVERS

  Roger Milliss

  Here, in the sward and verdure of the earth,

  Wreathed by wisteria in purple bloom,

  Kissed by the sun from the sky’s azure womb,

  We lay, nor fleeting thought of words which, since Time’s birth

  Lovers had whispered through eternity.

  Nor thought of lingering lovers who breathed so,

  And sang of spring when vernal breezes blow,

  And try to solve with love life’s mystery.

  And think, O heart and soul, how many times

  Wisteria will wither with the winter wind

  Soughing and sighing in its supple boughs.

  How oft the winter covered fields of slime

  In spring the breath of Nature’s bloom shall find,

  While lovers still eternal love avow.

  AFTERNOON INTERLUDE

  Pacita Moore

  The leaden grey afternoon

  Was roused by a curious clash;

  Spring collided with winter

  In a seasonal traffic smash.

  Snowflakes danced out of the sky

  In an unexpected rhumba,

  Startling the blossoming prunus

  Out of their damask slumber.

  Then a wing flung the clouds away

  Before the snow could settle,

  So spring’s only souvenir

  Was the gleam of ice on each petal.

  MIND-MAZE

  Jeffrey Miles

  Where do they lead, those back-lanes

  of the mind? You were safe while

  you strode down loud streets bright

  with what you were certain, a neonlit mile.

  But to get where you knew you wanted

  to get, you had to cross the side-street

  and when you stepped off the footpath

  into the gutter, you knew this meant doubt.

  A doubt, dark and twisting with what

  you knew you didn’t know, that ran past

  where the backyards of the oldhouses met,

  and where it turned - a solitary lamp-post.

  And just enough light to point you the way,

  sufficient to show you black palings on fences

  that hid blacker corners where gangsters lay,

  waiting to crack you across the head from behind.

  Yet you knew that fear lurked not

  in the shadows, but in the dim finger

  of light, just enough to show you that

  there were other side-lanes, twisting.

  For every street you saw, meant

  others that crossed, narrower and darker,

  and each you tried to follow, bent

  into others that led a different way.

  So you ended up you never knew where

  you wanted to get, you wanted to try

  to follow them all, back-lanes of the mind

  with just enough light to point you the way.

  POEMS

  Lionel J. Pearce

  I.

  A fir tree at Christmas

  Transported inside

  And covered with gifts

  Transfixed around it

  The eyes

  Of children with hearts yearning to pick it,

  So on motherhood you gazed

  A hand that brings the gift

  down to you.

  II.

  I long to be with beauty magnified

  Until the sun burns less. Too much his thanks

  For what is only labouring.

  She has more subtle rays his to replace

  That giving light burn not. In them love grows

  And with luxuriousness that removes design.

  Spontaneously each mouth shall eat, each pair recline.

  None from another shall despair of life.

  Beauty, discovered where hidden now she fails

  Her aspect on the world to shed

  Will change it so. So with me hunt for her.

  The sun’s keen dogs are on the earth.

  THE PHILOSOPHIC LIFE

  Julian Woods

  We do not ask to come and go

  We are pushed in and out of life

  And He is strange who does it;

  Invisibly He draws the hunting knife.

  We do not ask to cry or suffer

  The way is hard and the knife has edge

  So we stagger up misty slopes where the calls are wild

  And silent fall from the precious ledge.

  OF LEAVE TAKING

  Endre Ady

  Translated by Marie Kuttna

  I am a distant relation of Death;

  I love your love best when it is waning,

  My sweetest kisses are the kisses

  Of leave-taking.

  I love the musty scent of dying floweres,

  And the desire of women who are fading,

  And the glowing sadness of the autumn,

  - All things decaying.

  I love the faint call of long eerie hours,

  The whisper round the bend, the bated breath,

  The limpid image of relentless Death,

  Great, holy death …

  My loved ones are those who are departing,

  Those who know that life will never yield;

  And I love, on a dark, frosty morning

  The windswept fields.

  I love him who is disappointed,

  Who is injured, who has halted,

  Who no longer believes in faith -

  All hope thwarted.

  I love the moods of tired resignation,

  Of tearless sorrow, of peace bought too dearly,

  I love the designation of the dreamers:

  - The world around me.

  I am a distant relation of Death.

  I love your love best when it is waning

  My sweetest kisses are the kisses

  Of leave-taking.

  THE ROMAN WORLD

  Marie Kuttna

  Bread! said Vetullus

  Circuses, said I.

  Bread and circuses! demanded the plebs

  from Caesar.

  Bread and circuses! promised Caesar

  and he smiled.

  The harbour was shallow and the winter came,

  the tide withdrew,

  leaving no passage

  for ships to come through

  for wheat to come through.

  So the ships stayed out

  and emptily gaped

  Ostia’s mouth: and the plebian mouth.

  Bread! said Vetullus. Bread
and our rights!

  Circuses, said I,

  The people hailed Caesar.

  The people are starving, the Romans are hungry, said Vetullus:

  Caesar promised the circus, the big circus, said I,

  the arena glittered and thumbs went down

  wild beasts flickered and blood trickled

  the people hailed Caesar

  because they all were as drunk with blood

  as Caesar was drunk with their shouting.

  But the circus appalled noble Vetullus:

  Bread! said Vetullus.

  Guard your step said I,

  Caesar is drunk with the shouting of men

  and as no circus is enough for them

  Caesar would do much to draw out this hour

  for Caesar must be hailed and must have power.

  Vetullus! if the programme is not filled yet

  the execution of a conspirator

  becomes an entertaining act.

  But Vetullus thought of Cato the Old, and …

  Vetullus had been my friend.

  He was brave, he was true,

  But I was right.

  The Pauline Group, 21 May 1953

  TWO POEMS

  Judith Forsyth

  Smile tight lips, smile through the veil of stone,

  That wall shuts out the hammering sound.

  O image of a poet smile and give to us new verses!

  For we have outgrown and near fulfilled the old.

  Advice that once was treason and regret

  Now hangs a faded flag upon its pole,

  Waiting for a breath to set its limp folds in motion

  And call our patriots to form a living nation.

  The leaders strive within themselves, unquestioned.

  None ask, or delve into their policy of strife,

  But in the night of ignorance trend on, as dreamers

  Who sleepwalk towards the deep abyss,

  That yawns, a sleepy giant’s mouth below them.

  Interest flares, then fades to brittle ashes, as paper

  Does when thrown down on smouldering coals.

  O poet wake and give to men the realization of their souls!

  War is personified as freedom, and under pretext

  Turns the quiet countryside into a land of hate.

  How can we know the hand that holds the truth

  When both the palms are hidden from our sight?

  Surely incompatible are the right and left, and have been

  Thru the ages, indefinably different, but still the same.

  We who do not understand the subtlety of fate

  O poet speak to us before it is too late.

  What does he think of there

  Leaning the wind in his hair,

  Reaching out to the spray

  Suppliant to the wide bay?

  His boat like a white headed arrow

  With foam for its feathered tip

  Flies thru the treacherous shallow,