THE SIXTIES: The 1960s ?

THE SIXTIES: THE 1960s ?


Decade drawn in dissembling rainbows & counterfeit, counter
culture, psychedelic drugs, pop music views and the soft disease
of surreality in flower power and sweet watermelon wine!

A valourising of cupidous paedophile Eastern flouters
as gurus, of dropping out, of speaking in parenthesise,
the championing of Communists like Mao as if benign.

All while we knew Mao Tse-Tung was starving out
murdering and shooting 78,000,000 fellow Chinese
communist citizens of China from 1958 to 1969.



Image: Chinese victim of Mao's Great Famine during the 'Cultural Revolution'

BECAUSE YOU APPLAUD ME

BECAUSE YOU APPLAUD ME


Because you applaud me, I cannot
speak to you. Because you would applaud
me I cannot tell you a thing, not a single thing.
Because you are so ready to applaud me, my tongue
sticks to the roof of my mouth as if it were wet flour
that makes dough on my palate. Because you are
so bent on applauding me I am struck dumb. I am
quite silenced by your too loud applause, because of
your will to clap every true message away, the prophecy
that I would bring, that would become another mere talent act,
is untold, unheard, unsaid, and the gut-wrenching declamation
that I would to decry, is deflated by your suffocating applause,
by the squeezed airway of your applause, the divined message
pricked down by that gregariously crowded applause, and, so
because of your self-willed negating applause, I have nothing
but thoughtless bubbles to say to you.


WDK @ November 19, 2014


Image: 'North Korean conscripts voluntarily applaud their Great Leader.'

You Who

YOU WHO STONE


You who stone the prophets, or else lounge to ignore
them in disdain while they live, but when dead, then
heap up a mass of flowers in prodigailty on their memorial
and after raise whitewashed stones in their honour as
if they were one of you, your own, as if you were like them.

How could you be who have refused the road, the dry miles?
You who could not bear in any share of their word scraping.
You who could not even hear, would not try to use that tongue
- as if it was an organ, a finger so coloured, so foreign, so
strange, that all pride in yourself as unprejudiced is lost?


- WDK @ 17 December 2014

Portrait of The Farmer As An Earth Artist

Portrait Of The Productive Farmer As An Earth Artist

- (for Tony Phillips of Birriwindi)


The artist walks out to be in his studio, to his long-lasting
big work, he comes from the door of his dwelling, changing
to tough boots at the porch, it's in these he comes, a vehicle
carries him, comes to the vast canvas, to the work, and what
is it here that he does? He pauses as if out of time, he long-looks
in a green ochre and brown study, like an even-handed judge
coming slow to the weighing for making a report, yet suppressing
the shout for what this work is becoming. He frames his eyes
with the gesture of one hand, in the old sign language that many
other earth artists could understand, to select of a vast landscape,
of this large paddock of new-sown lucerne, for it is this of which
his night dreams consist, this which the day-dreams paint verdant.
It is the work of these many years of lifetime. It was two years
ago that he found inspiration here to let the land go fallow
and then, with the rank gouche of poor fog grass high as four
winds rippled it, he ploughed the pallette knife of his tractor
through its bulk, it was him threw it down, disced it under like
burying the old dead bodies that would feed an idea of these
small leguminous leaves, this bud, this beginning of a deep
rooted crop, this turning of earth a rich leafy full production.
He steps with care across its scarified brush strokes, crouches
with care for booted feet between its shoots, and reaching down,
he crumbles the clods of earth as if it were living treasure.


WDK

Sheik

SHEIK


All sheiks are self-styled sheiks.
Every Sheik is a self-styled sheik.
There is no ordaining authority.
The words self-styled that are
used to try discredit one who
came out, rogue, discredits all.

My Country (In Bonds)

"I love a Red-Taped country
A land of Bureaucratic forms
Of miles of yellowed triplicates
Of Green Papers, Digital norms;
I love her vast Proformas
Her Documental artesian sea
Her proper channels of terror
A queue at the desk for me."

MY COUNTRY (IN BONDS)

- after Dorothea Mackellar

The love of wit and freedom
Of soapbox speakers in a park
Of ordered dissent in gardens
A Magna Carta that you mark;
Patriotic scenes, heartfelt mindscapes,
Permanent streams, emancipated skies
We know of, but despise all that
Our true love is otherwise.

I love a red-taped country
A land of bureaucratic forms
Of miles of yellowed triplicates
Of green papers, digital norms;
I love her vast proformas
Her documental artesian sea
Her proper channels of terror
A queue at the desk for me.

A long commute each morning
A slow commute home after dark,
The off-white walls of buildings
Our gravy-train hero: the clerk.
Sound of paper in an out-tray
Song of files slotting into place
The life that produces our pay
Efficient use of office space.

Heart of our report, this country!
Her pitiless soul caught in paper
Sick at heart, but surrounded
In cool shade by the skyscraper;
So, when daily dark clouds gather
They have far worse to fear;
The loathsome public servant,
The bureaucrat - shaking a spear.

Heart of the country, the office
Land of the officious excise
Strong love for corridors of distance,
Flow charts ‘neath curtain’d skies;
After the demanding letters
Watch for a notice to rationalise,
The thin wedge of lettered whiteness
To dulls wits and tranquillise.

An obedient-hearted country
A willfully standoffish land
All who are not enslaved by her
So few like to understand;
Though earth has many a splendour
Wherever Australians may die
Give me a death certificate to fill out
A cremation form as alibi.

Image: Death of A Husband, 1958, by the late Australian artist Arthur Boyd.

Name-Droppingly Prejudiced

NAME-DROPPINGLY PREJUDICED

We'd become so name-droppingly prejudiced that
after the meteoric calamity fell on us many grouped
up so as not be anywhere near Allan Jones even
though he was manning a rescue boat while a
following of others formed a sort-of joint drown vow
with Sarah Hanson Young in the wave-flood water,
even then up on the ramparts an every-woman for
herself coterie stood by Julia Gillard in contradiction
of it all as if some ideal was coming to the rescue.

The New Leaves

LEAVES OF GREEN

The new leaves of the ivy do not
look around testing air for danger,
they simply burst forth in joy like
Christmas presents torn from their
buds in soft tissue-green naiveté,
full of such vim of sap and bounce
and do only slowly harden up tough
in their darkened gills and yet it’s
all of it that foments the poison.

27 December 2014

Brendan The Bringer

BRENDAN THE BRINGER


Every day for six days Brendan
rises at the quarter to two AM
has a fast coffee and walks out
into the night whether it's bright-starred
or overcast goes around the corner to
the side street where he parks it
and climbs up like a night pilot to
the lit cabin of his prime mover
- a Mack truck rig with doubles, two
trailers full of skim milk powder
or it might be full cream from a dairy
processing plant down at Koroit and
he throws the switch to start those
big pistons moving till it fires like a
small volcana of laval rumbling, the
call of just this one engine among
the many that throb along our dreams
and only rarely wake us to perception
and then not to give any real thought
to the weighty tonnes of this great baby
freight of extradited mother's milk
which Brendan will bring hurtling
down the truck-tyre-spooned state
highways where silent owls flutter
towards the depots and the ports
of the cities where infant food is
vastly consumed with small consultation
with the cows which Brendan passes
as he, quietly as it can be done, eases
the big rig into bulk motion and racks
the stick up a piano of gears to turn the
music of those trailers in many milk tonnes
out to slowly pick up speed like it was
a sort of precious metal until the delimit
signs end and then the riffs break into
the whole theme as the music swells
as our night rocket is speeding in
like a sleeping babe snoring by
with trusty Brendan at the wheel
towards all that crying need where
the money concentrates where the
money congeals for a bringer's reward.
When he has delivered his load
Brendan turns the truck about
and goes the opposite way on
the very same road indentations
till he gets to Koroit to fill up again
with powdered milk and so drives
the rig back home by late afternoon
spends small time with family going
early to bed so he can wake again
to take the load at quarter to 2 AM.


Image: Milk Factory, Koroit, Victoria

Hue of the Fantail

Hue of The Fantail

Grey fantail, the hidden soul who sits for less
than seconds as if the very mortal tree branch
was stuck with fresh-mixed epoxy cage-glue,
for all its wings are a career, proudly professed,
with the acrobatic live witness of its wide tail fan
ready for all four dimensions to be gyred through.

Australian Bark

AUSTRALIAN SUMMER BARK


In their time at the shedding of the outer bark
the gum trees wax colourful and swell out with the
hue cry of a summer of drinking up all the spring
to bedeck themselves in flags & pennant ribbands
in flying streamers of curling, twisting tree leather
shed of upper limbs as used-up innocence goes cracking
to falling like floats strung in the summer parade
where the arches-n-bows of harvest bark make neckties
of the bole in its firm buttressess as it were a god
or a icon of one, a great upthrust spire to one.


- 31st December 2014

ScienceAlert

Why do Eucalypts shed their bark? It turns out the trees expand in the warmer month, but their bark can't stretch, so instead it peels off in long strips. This also helps to remove pests, and reveals the beautiful mottled patterns underneath.

Images and information via Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment

WARMER WEATHER

CHANGING WARM WEATHER

The sun shines as it did;
high summer cloud wisps
up like summer cloud does;
as a birthday candle breeze
puffs the green leaves aflicker
and aglow as if a mind played
with a gift of light just like it was
another morning of the world.

31st December 2014

WATERTANK

A CORRUGATED IRON WATERTANK

A corrugated-iron watertank is unlike a beach
of sand where the tide has rippled up the skin,
for the galvanising breaks up the light in shards
like a platoon of silver-curved swords thrust out
above inside shadow, each glint of light on edge
is sharp as the dry dapples that hold the water in
strengthening a guard arm in the arc of flow-through
as the metal swings its left hook and its right to
join hands in unspilt victory drink on the other side.

The gradually diminishing dull-echoed rungs were
the grim ladder rungs with which our grandparents
climbed up out of the droughts of summers past
each pewter-coin circle of stored rainwater a pool
of common use to be meted out by a careful glass
so even a dish of washwater carried splashless out
was lipped across a lettuce patch as dose in salve
for green stuff in the palate, it rung of no idle cream
familiar of beaches: frugal priority had real draught.