CUTTING THISTLES -by Tony Lintermans

CUTTING THISTLES

-by Tony Lintermans

Decimating thistles by shovel and curse
and rock-jarred hand, I recall my father’s
friendly warning against perfection:
‘To look a thistle in the eye and not flinch
is the test of temperament. If you can nod
“G’day” and walk away smiling, you’re right.
Otherwise you’re always at it.” Wise words.

But vicious glee in the perfectly swung shovel
shooting purple heads skywards is what he missed,
where each stalk sliced off is delirium?
Too late, this white juice dribbling. Summer
will sow these paddocks with thistledown blown
from fallen seed heads, opened. Pre-emptive strikes
leave wounded stalks, a windy father slighted.

* Tony Lintermans, Victoria, Australia

THE ANTEATER - by Peter Gebhardt

-beautiful poem-portrait of the Australian Echidna -

THE ANTEATER

- by Peter Gebhardt, Geelong, VIC

Suddenly the soft soil erupts
A nib pushed through
And then a thousands quills
Poised to leave their marks.

It is the nib which fills itself
With the scuttling ants;
The quills that make their points
With the inquisitive invader.

A Kite Is A Victim - by Leonard Cohen

A Kite Is A Victim

- by Leonard Cohen

A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you master,
strong enough to call you fool;
because it lives
like a desperate trained falcon
in the high sweet air,
and you can always haul it down
to tame it in your drawer.

* * *

- Leonard Cohen, 1969

BORGES AND I - by Jorge Luis Borges

- " Some honest narcissism without the distracting mirrors ?"

BORGES AND I

- by Jorge Luis Borges

The other one, Borges, is
the one to whom things happen.

I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause,
perhaps mechanically nowadays, to gaze
at an entrance archway and its metal gate;

I hear about Borges via the mail,
and read his name on a list of professors
or in some biographical dictionary.

I enjoy hourglasses, maps,
eighteenth century typography, etymology,
the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose:

the other shares my preferences but in a vain way
that transforms them to an actor’s props.
It would be an exaggeration to say

that our relationship is hostile; I live,
I keep on living, so that Borges can weave
his literature, and that literature justifies me.

It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages
are valid, but those pages can’t save me,
perhaps because good writing belongs to no one,

not even the other, but only to language and tradition.
For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively,
and only some aspect of me can survive in the other.

Little by little, I will yield all to him,
even though his perverse habit of falsifying
and exaggerating is clear to me.

Spinoza understood that all things want
to go on being themselves; the stone eternally
wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger.

I am forced to survive as Borges, not myself
(if I am a self), yet I recognise myself less
in his books than in many others, less too

than in the studious strumming of a guitar.
Years ago I tried to free myself from him,
and passed from suburban mythologies

to games of time and infinity, but now
those are Borges’ games and I will
have to think of something new.

Thus my life is a flight
and I will lose all and all will belong
to oblivion, or to that other.

I do not know which
of us is writing this page.

* * *
- translated from the Argentine Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentinian writer, poet & social critic

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN - by Jorge Luis Borges

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

- by Jorge Luis Borges

I think of things that weren’t,
but might have been.

The treatise on Saxon myths
Bede never wrote.

The inconceivable work Dante might
have had a glimpse of,

As soon as he’d corrected the
Comedy’s last verse.

History without the afternoons of the Cross
and the hemlock.

History without the face
of Helen.

Man without the eyes that gave
us the moon.

On Gettysburg’s three days,
victory for the South.

The love we
never shared.

The wide empire the Vikings
chose not to found.

The world without the wheel
or the rose.

The view John Donne held
of Shakespeare.

The other horn
of the Unicorn.

The fabled Irish bird that lights
on two trees at once.

The child I never had.

* * *
- translated from the Argentine Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentinian writer, poet & critic

ON THE AUSTRALIAN 'SPIRIT OF LIBERTY' 'Never Mind" by Charles Harpur

ON THE AUSTRALIAN 'SPIRIT OF LIBERTY'

'Never Mind"

- by Charles Harpur

My Country, though rude
yet, and wild, be thy nature,
This alone our proud love
should beget and command:
There's a noon in thy broad breast
for Manhood's full stature,
And honest Endeavour's
a lord in the land.

And though much of thy bounty,
by aliens in feeling
Has been made upon heads
the least worthy to fall,
Their reign is nigh past,
and the wrong is fast healing,
And they wide arms encircle
a home for us all.

And though pygmies high-placed
in our councils yet fool us,
In our woods there's a
Giant upgrowing the while -
The Spirit of Liberty -
destined to rule us,
And cheer on the world
from the great Austral Isle!

* * * Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.

OR -

in the original verse style

ON THE AUSTRALIAN 'SPIRIT OF LIBERTY'

'Never Mind"

- by Charles Harpur

My Country, though rude yet, and wild, be thy nature,
This alone our proud love should beget and command:
There's a noon in thy broad breast for Manhood's full stature,
And honest Endeavour's a lord in the land.

And though much of thy bounty, by aliens in feeling
Has been made upon heads the least worthy to fall,
Their reign is nigh past, and the wrong is fast healing,
And they wide arms encircle a home for us all.

And though pygmies high-placed in our councils yet fool us,
In our woods there's a Giant upgrowing the while -
The Spirit of Liberty -destined to rule us,
And cheer on the world from the great Austral Isle!

* * * Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.

THE LABOR PARTY - by Tony Lintermans

THE LABOR PARTY

- by Tony Lintermans

A zoo animal that no one visits,
but needs feeding. A cuddle
carried like a rancid parcel
to polling day, nowhere to put it.
A howling muddle with no middle.

Plumb out of soul to sell,
fratricidal rumblings in its tract,
factions or stones in its stomach.
Left, right, pacing like a swell
with a pauper on its back.

Bored, frantic, shaggy and bereft
this beast was once a star:
powerful, nearly moral, popular.
When the leopard has no spots left
we in cages mourn from afar.

-from the anthology 'Best Australian Poems', 2005

COULD WE AS MORTALS - by Charles Harpur

COULD WE AS MORTALS

- by Charles Harpur

Could we as mortals but our end foresee,
How little in our minds the world would be;

Could we as spirits but this life renew,
And be again incarnate as we were,

How little might be done like what we do,
How little cared for that which now is most our care

* * *

Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.

WELL HAST THOU FOUGHT FOR OUR AUSTRALIAN FREEDOM - TO DR LANG

WELL HAST THOU FOUGHT FOR OUR AUSTRALIAN FREEDOM

To Doctor LANG

(Reverend Doctor John Dunmore LANG (25 August 1799 – 8 August 1878) was a turbulent Scottish-born Australian Presbyterian minister, writer, politician and activist. He was the first prominent advocate of an independent Australian nation.)

To Doctor LANG

- by Charles Harpur

Little, perhaps, thou valuest verse of mine—
Little hast read of what my hand has wrought,

Yet I with thy brave memory would entwine
The muse’s amaranths. For thou well hast fought

For freedom; well her sacred lessons taught;
Well baffled wrong; and delved with far design

Into those elements where treasures shine
Excelling those wherewith our hills are fraught.

And when thy glorious grey head shall make
One spot all-hallowed for the coming days—

Tombed in the golden land for whose sole sake
With labour thou hast furrowed all thy ways,—

Well a young nation shall thy worth appraise
Even through the grief which then shall o’er thee break

* * * Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.

PICTURE: Rev. John Dunmore LANG (25 Aug 1799 – 8 Aug 1878)

AN EMIGRANT'S VISION

A SHILOH OF FREEDOM - BE THE HOME OF MY HOPE, AUSTRALIA

- An Emigrant's Vision -

- by Charles Harpur

As his barque dashed away on the night-shrouded deep,
And out towards the South he was gazing,
First there passed o’er his spirit a darkness like sleep,
Then the light of a vision amazing!

As rises the moon, from the white waves afar
Came a goddess, it seemed, of love, wisdom, and war,
And on her bright helmet, encircling a star,
Behold there was graven “Australia.”

Her robes were of green, like the mantle of spring
Newly spread by the streams that so mildly
Flow on through yon flock-dappled plains, or that sing
’Mid those blue ranging mountains so wildly:

Her locks were as bright as the lustre that lies
At morn on the seas of the South, and her eyes
Were as deep in their joy as the clear sunny skies—
The clear sunny skies of Australia.

“O stranger!” she said, “hast thou fled from the home
Which they forefathers bled for so vainly?
Does shame for its past thus induce thee to roam,
Or despair of its future constrain thee?

In the far sunny South there’s a refuge from wrong,
’Tis the Shiloh of freedom expected so long;
There genius and glory shall shout forth their song—
’Tis the evergreen land of Australia.

“There Truth her abode on the forest-clad hills
Shall establish, a dweller for ever,
And Plenty rejoice by the gold-pebbled rills,
Well mated to honest endeavour,

Till the future a numberless people shall see,
Eager, and noble, and equal, and free,
And the God they adore their sole monarch shall be—
Then come, build thy home in Australia!”

She said. Towards the South she passed brightly away,
And at once, as from slumber, he started;
But the cadences sweet of the welcoming lay
Yet breathed of the vision departed;

And when o’er the deep these had fadingly spread,
The swell of his heart, as he rose from his bed,
Broke loud into words on his tongue, and he said—
“Be the home of my hope, then, Australia!”

* * * Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.

SONNET TO THE AUSTRALIAN LIBERTY

"My Political Belief "

- by Charles Harpur

O LIBERTY, yet build thee an august
And best abode in this most virgin clime;
The Old World yet, power-trampled to the dust,
Hath never known thee in thy perfect prime!
Seeing all Rule which at a given time
Expires not, as reposed in Public Trust,
And thence renewable but by Suffrage, must
Against thee in its nature be a crime!
Seeing that all not privileged to name
Their governors—and more, to govern too,
Choosing or chosen, but live unto thy blame!
That all are slaves in act who may not do
Whate’er is virtuous and in spirit who
Believing aught dare not avow the same!

* * * Charles Harpur (1813-1868) was a native-born Australian poet, son of a transported convict who became a schoolteacher and his transportee wife.