 
THE PAULINE GROUP

A Literary Society

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY, 1949 – 1955

Edited by Julian Woods
FOREWORD

The few pieces of prose come early in the series and discontinued, one imagines, because of the amount of work for the member producing the stencils.

One venue, as I recall (and it would have changed over the years) was a rather shabby room in Macquarie St. in a building no doubt long since giving way to high-rise city flats for barristers and business men. It was certainly at 151 Elizabeth St. in July, August and September, 1952. Roger Milliss recalls that some meetings in the 1950s were at St. Paul's College.

I guess most of the poets were of the Arts Faculty and knew many, if not all, of the fellow members in their particular undergraduate years. I have been unable to discover the origins of the Pauline Group and even in 1952 the origins were unknown to most members apart from a vague connection to St. Paul's College. One may guess the originator was Bill Belson but that seems doubtful he being probably the first compiler of the meetings and copying them for distribution.

The bundle of faded and torn roneoed sheets that comprise what remains of the Pauline Group from its first meeting on the 5th of April, 1949 until it (apparently) petered sometime in 1955 came into my possession from Keith Free in 2013. From the dilapidated cardboard cover, Bill Belson, then of 33 Roslyn St. Kings Cross, it seems, was the first keeper of the file and probably roneoed the copies for the first meeting and (one supposes) many subsequent ones. Roger Brown passed it to Jeff Miles who was the editor in 1952, full of enthusiasm to the extent of producing many copies of David Haig's famous poem, Impotence: "If I could grasp the gambit of my life..." - and distributing them in the quad at the foot of the Old Fisher Library stairs. Keith Free, at Sydney University, some time in 1954 then took over. Subsequent editors were Manfred Mackenzie, and Colin Black. After that I have no information. Manfred MacKenzie was either in charge or received the manuscripts later and at some time in the decades since, copies from 1954 and 1955 went missing before they came back to Keith Free's keeping.

On re-typing these poems into a computer it became clear what a large amount of work the editors put into each issue from the several contributors, the cutting of stencils, running off copies etc.

There was further clarification of origins, yet more puzzles from the St. Paul's College historian, Alan Atkinson. Six Pauline Group contributors only were on his College files, Jim Lance, E.H. Manchester, T.W. Horne, Bill Moriarty, Dave Rutherford and John K. McLaughlin. Yet apart from the last named all were born in the 1920s and left the College before the manuscripts came into existence in April 1949. In addition none were Arts students. One may assume that earlier meetings, if any, took place with poets reading their own works, at the College and the readings not collected.

All of us are in our seventh or eighth decade so I decided to turn the series into a book before death or decay, with no further research. Several in my years in Arts are deceased, John Croyston, Marie Kuttna, Sue Vacchini, Robin Pratt and Dick Appleton. Dick Appleton was never an actual student. Colin Black disappeared decades ago, as it were, in Hamburg. In latter years, Lex Banning, who died in 1965, would attend a few meetings and assert criticism that never discouraged. Another prominent poet, Vincent Buckley, was a guest attending during his Sydney visit in either 1955 or '56.

Among the missing issues I recall a Canto of Dick Appleton's of similar form to those of Pound's. Also at least one translation from Rilke by Colin Black.

To my surprise we are looking at a collection sixty and more years old. One has to imagine what an editor would see as an historical collection and the changes if he were doing this in 1913 looking at poetry from the early 1850s - to secure a non-personal perspective of time. Apart from anything else the collection records the concerns and styles of the undergraduate poetry of the time and the influences and fame of different masters of the period such as Eliot and Auden, Pound etc. as well as the Romantics, even back to Milton, on individuals. Dick Appleton was obsessed with Ezra Pound and the influences of Whitman, Sandburg, Hart Crane, e.e.cummings and others may be seen. Such is youth. I have kept the punctuation as it occurs noting how carefully colons and semi-colons were used in those days.

If by chance this collection comes to the notice of anyone, to the authors themselves, to descendants or friends, with more information, and especially if the lost issues come to light, I would bring out another edition. As for me, curiosity and nostalgia has been satisfied.

On contacting me at my address copies may be ordered for $20 a copy including postage.

Julian Woods  
Pumpkin Creek  
491 Williams Drive  
TARAGO, NSW 2580

16/11/2013
FOREWORD TO THE ONLINE EDITION

Since the limited edition of the Pauline Group collection of poetry, published in 2014, more information about the Group's history emerged researched by  Alan Atkinson, the Historian of St. Paul's College, Sydney University. Even more interesting and important came his singular discovery of the great educator, Wilhelm Reichnitz, long forgotten, who initiated and fostered poetry and prose in the College magazine, The Pauline and spread its coverage beyond the College into the wider community.

As may be read in Alan Atkinson's article following, this German prisoner-of-war, Wilhelm Reichnitz, had been interned in Great Britain in 1939 even though enthusiastically integrated into English life and an anti-fascist. In two years he stimulated and transformed many areas of College life. He was one of the 3,000, mainly German Jews, fleeing Nazism, interned and sailing in the prisoner ship the Dunera to further imprisonment, "for the duration," as the saying was to Australia. After the war he and many others stayed on and became so important in Australia's cultural life. Would we had accepted fifty such Duneras and their cargo.

Some assumptions in the original foreword need revising. In particular the guess that most of the poets originally were of the Arts Faculty. The majority, it seems were not. Such was the prestige of poetry till recent years. In the 1950s members of the Pauline Group believed that its activities were limited to university students and graduates but this too is an error as Rechnitz wanted coverage to be Sydney-wide and even Australia-wide. Members had assumed that the first roneoed batch of papers in 1949 accompanied the founding of the Group. Meetings and readings by Pauline students, with selected poems published in The Pauline, started earlier and continued concurrently. Thus the name, the Pauline Group. The list of Rechnitz's other impacts on college life is astonishing in such a short period.

As yet the missing issues from 1954-55 have not turned up so perhaps this spread on the Net may get results.

I am indebted to Josephine and Katy Woods for the stimulus and expertise necessary for this edition.

Julian Woods  
12/9/2015
WILHELM RECHNITZ AND THE ST PAUL'S COLLEGE LITERARY SOCIETY

Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz was a German Jew with a doctorate from the University of Berlin who fled his country in about 1934 to escape the Nazis. He was a linguist and philologist and in Germany he had been editor of the learned quarterly journal, Bibliotheca Philologica Classica, published in Leipzig. And translated classical plays for the Leipzig's Old Theatre. In England he looked for work with the British Academy but found nothing except part-time school teaching and some Latin tutoring. He made contact with the poet A.E. Housman, a keen classical philologist, and, as a man of deep spirituality, he was sufficiently impressed with his new home to undergo baptism in the Church of England.

This did not help. As a German, with the outbreak of war Rechnitz was interned and, in 1940, he was deported to Australia on the _Dunera_ , together with nearly 3000 others, most of them German Jews, the vessel being designed to carry 1600. By one account the _Dunera_ was "an overcrowded Hellhole" and Churchill himself called the whole episode "a deplorable and regrettable mistake." Nevertheless, in Australia Rechnitz was again interned for the duration of the war. (Our current policy of imprisoning men and women who flee persecution is older than it might seem.) On release, he taught briefly at the Brotherhood of St. Laurence training centre in Melbourne and then at St. John's College, Morpeth, before he was taken up by the interim Warden of St.Paul's, Maurice de Burgh Griffith, who appointed him resident tutor in Classics and German from the start of 1946.

The Pauline of that year noted that Rechnitz had also started to do "valuable work in sorting and cataloguing the College libraries", or in other words the mass of books which had been stacked for some years in the Fellows' Common Room, the Bone Room and elsewhere. Rechnitz divided the volumes into a "Students' Library" and a "Fellows' Library". The Fellows Library was set up in the Fellows' Common Room and its holdings were surprisingly numerous and valuable. Rechnitz was not only a man of unquenchable spirit, he was also the College's first learned bibliophile. The rare and hitherto unnoticed publications which he unearthed included a Roman Missal printed in Bavaria in about 1480, a Legends of the Saints, from Cologne, 1485, and a volume of Canon Law from Lyon, 1517. Print itself (movable type) had been invented only a generation or two before these dates.

Rechnitz spent two years in College and he made a deep impact. His interest in languages was encyclopedic, and he saw beneath each language he studied into a world of spirituality and ideas. He saw all communities in that way, including the College itself, and his interest in Anglicanism was interwoven with his interest in the subtleties of English and Englishness. Maybe it is no coincidence that A.E. Housman's famous work, The Shropshire Lad, contains verse rooted in English soil and tradition, as well as being democratic, romantic and melancholy. Rechnitz seems to have echoed this attitude.

The men at Paul's appreciated Wilhelm Rechnitz. His valete in The Pauline noted with wide-eyed admiration that while "the Doctor" had been among them he had written "various academic books about anything from Anglican churches to German primers" plus a couple of novels (one of them a detective story), as well as poetry in English and German. He was "a notable character". He was ready "to talk with anyone," it said. He was full, of life, "and will never be forgotten for his unrestrained laughter at a (recent) General Meeting... which disorganized things for a considerable time".

Rechnitz appreciated them too. He was credited with "discovering in certain men artistic ability which neither they nor anybody else knew it existed [sic] and encouraging it in those who already suspected it did exist". For "artistic" read "literary". In his first year, early in Trinity (second) Term, Rechnitz established the St. Paul's College Literary Society, which was designed to draw out original writings by students, beginning with a meeting on the 14th of August in the Common Room. These were poetry-reading sessions, and good recitation, by the author or someone else, and were highly valued. Even at this early stage there were hopes of extending the Society beyond the College, "so as to include the University, authors of the city, of the State and even of the Commonwealth". Rechnitz, or perhaps it was only his enthusiastic followers, aimed to make a mark on Australia.

Rechnitz's main supporters hardly needed drawing out. In the previous year, Edward Manchester, a medical student, had been one of the editorial committee responsible for an "obscene" issue of Honi Soit (12 July). Another man, Max Thomas (Arts and Divinity), had edited the 1945 Pauline, and in it had published verse by fellow-students and Rechnitzians, Andrew Clayton (Law) and Jim Lance (Medicine), Clayton sometimes using the pseudonym "Strepsiades" (the anti-hero in Aristophanes' "The Clouds"). Lance more modestly called himself "L". In 1946 Manchester filled the Pauline's editorial chair and Clayton and Lance were both on the committee, with Clayton taking over as editor in 1947. Clayton and Max Thomas seem to have been the student convenors of Rechnitz's Society during 1946-47.

The Society focused, so Clayton said, on attempts in the style of "New Verse". Poetry survives from this time written by Lance, Manchester, David Rutherford (Vet), Bill Moriarty (Science) and Terry Horne (Medicine). Moriarty's "Posterity?" was probably one of the first to be performed at the Common Room meetings:

As slowly as the cheerless twilight falls  
I gaze in vague uneasy fear  
On mighty summer's ruined glory;  
The failing light might mourn the year.

And tearing out of the icy north,  
The wind assaults the frozen soil  
And howls thro' broken limbs a dirge  
To a thousand years of useless toil.

Above, the steely cloud and grey  
And ragged the clouds in terror flying:  
While the pallid moon looks down, timeless,  
A dead world above the dying.

Whatever the quality of the poem, it might suggest that "New Verse" as the College understood it, had more to do with Romantic Englishness, or at least the northern hemisphere, than with the literary nationalism so far favoured among Paulines. The literary critic and poet Tom Inglis Moore, who had lived in the College as English tutor and Sub-Warden 1932-34, had helped the tone hitherto. John Russell Roland, who was to be a poet of some celebrity, had used the same style in his student verse, 1942-44.

Now, post-war, the College mood was devoid of nationalism. Now, it pondered ancient things caught up in the present – earth-bound eternity and existential helplessness in the passage of the years (Housman with a touch of Eliot, if such is possible). A new familiarity with Roman missals half a millennium old might have helped, but Rechnitz himself must have made some such impression. He arranged the program and chose the poems. As another example, take Dave Rutherford's "Stone Walls", one of the few such pieces that referred to living in College:

Sandstone walls, grey walls,  
Darkened in 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 walks  
Which enclose us in our sheltered life.

As with Moriarty's "Posterity?" this poem was considered good enough for recycling some years later.

These authors were all Paul's students, but by the Society's second year "by far the greater bulk" of contributions came from beyond. Two students at Wesley College distinguished themselves: Bill Belson, who was unusually prolific, and Werner Stern, whose "Elegy on a Dying Author" was said to be the best item that year. It no longer survives, but another of Stern's poems ("Brother are You Coming?") shows the same preoccupation with the power of passing time:

Walk on  
Your narrow strip of wet sand.  
No matter how big your feet,  
No matter how quiet your beat,  
The waves will rise,  
And smooth out your path;  
And the road will be flat again  
For those that follow.

It is not clear what happened to Stern – the road he walked himself is quite smoothed out – but Belson was afterwards well-known on British radio as a social psychologist. The only other poet named at this stage was Winsome Latter, who for some years had been deeply involved with the Jindyworobak school of poets, and who had a son nearly ready, as she hoped, for College. In Michaelmas (third) Term a recital of the group's best work was held at the University, but poor acoustics limited success.

Rechnitz was one of those keen educators who argues almost instinctively with his peers and superiors. He and the new Warden, Felix Arnott, did not agree, and he departed late in 1947 for Torres Strait, to take charge of St. Paul's Mission School on Moa, a school founded many years before by Henry Newton, a Pauline Bishop of New Guinea. He was to spend most of the rest of his life there, working on the translation and preservation of Indigenous culture, including music. He was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1954. His papers, which survive in the State Library of Queensland, are a detailed and extremely valuable record of the life of Torres Straight Islanders, as ever, interweaving language, culture and spiritual life. He lived for a time on Murray Island (Mer) and Eddie Mabo must have known him. Certainly Rechnitz's work echoes in the High Court's  Mabo No. 2 judgment from 1992, where Indigenous mystery finds its fruitful counterpoint in European learning.

At the same time the Society also lost Clayton, Manchester, Moriarty and Thomas. Having fallen away towards the end of 1947 it was renamed "the Pauline Group", in order to sound less exclusive to Paul's, and over a series of four meetings there was some slight revival "to a well-nigh respectable number". Presumably Jim Lance and David Rutherford, the only Pauline poets left, were the convenors. Certainly Rutherford, now treasurer of the Students' Club, published several poems that year in The Pauline. For both, this was their last year in College, and from the end of 1948 the connection with Paul's seems to have come to an end, though the name "Pauline Group" remained.

Of the Pauline poets named in later life Clayton became a senior partner in his father's law firm, Clayton Utz, and Mayor of Woollahra, and he continued, doubtless, many-faceted and unpredictable (the verdict of The Pauline). Max Thomas became Bishop of Wangaratta and later Warden of his old College. Moriarty was also ordained but he was better known as a distinguished meteorologist. He became a member of the World Meteorologists Organization's working group on urban and building climatology. Manchester was a radiologist. Jim Lance was a Professor of Neurology at the University of New South Wales, a senior figure in the World Federation of Neurology and, in the end AO. Rutherford, who had grown up on the land, went back to it, and was chairman of the Orange Farm Management Group, vice-president of the Molong Historical Society and president of Cudal P&C.

A new series of meetings of the Pauline Group began on 5 April 1949, with Bill Belson, now living at King's Cross, as convenor. Previous experience had proved the need for the audience to have copies of poems on hand during readings, to compensate for inexpert presentation, and roneoed sheets survive from this point. It is said that the Pauline Group sometimes met at the College during the 1950s. If so, that might be explained by a happy coincidence of events 1952-53. Jim Lance returned to College, as Sub-Warden, and was presumably still interested in verse. Also, the literary critic R. J. Wilson was tutor in English. Wilson achieved several revolutions in College, according to The Pauline, one concerning food, the second, aeroplanes and the third books (he got men "to read things and talk about things in a reasonably serious, reasonably intelligible and not-too-plonking fashion"). Thirdly, Tom Heath, poet and architect, was editor of the magazine. Heath's later career as an architectural theorist proves his remarkable imagination. The Tom Heath Gallery at the Queensland University of Technology is one of his memorials.

Finally, there was Roger Hargreaves – his conversation ("omniscient, amusing, and obscene"), his acting with the Mummers (drawing "reluctant admiration" from the Sydney Morning Herald), his research hopes (a thesis in Anthropology, never written, on "The Sodomite in Society"), and his poetry. The last included a chanting, gothic piece that Tom Heath took for The Pauline, called "Nursery-Rhyme for Dr. Edith Sitwell".

Deep anvils clanging in a dead dark sky  
Deal doom to the dull dust, deathly dry  
etc.

Hargreaves is one of those members of the College who has now, to all effects, disappeared without trace. If any of his work was read to the remnant of Dr. Rechnitz's group, the record therefore is silent – again, the sand is quite smooth.

Alan Atkinson

(Thanks to Professor Barry Spurr and the Reverend Professor John Moses for advice and to Julian Woods for the original inspiration.)

Photo reprinted with permission of Alan Atkinson, Historian of St Paul's College, The University of Sydney.

AUTHORS

In order of first appearance:

Reba Ginsburg

Roger Challis Brown

Gwen West

Bill Belson

Lionel J. Pierce (Pearce?)

Judith (June?) Hartnett

Winsome Latter

Norris Devir

Jim Lance

Roger F. Brown

Neville Kirkby

F. H. Burns

E. H. Manchester

B. O'Sullivan

T. W. Horne

Bill Rush

Bill Moriarty

Gerard Hamilton

Norreys de Vere

Gunnar Icoocson

Roger F. Brown

Leon Stemler

Garth Everson

Ian Dunlop

Rex Ingamells

Werner Stern

Diana Burton

Dave Rutherford

Claire Binns

John W. Phipps

Wendell Simmons

O. Sperling

Bill (W. R?) Richards

C. J. Nommensen

Athalie Fenton

Ian I. S. Stacy

Jeffrey Miles

David A. Haig

Marie Kuttna

Ruth Hansman

S. Green

John Croyston

Robin Pratt

Julian Woods

Roger Milliss

Pacita Moore

Judith Forsyth

Manfred MacKenzie

Susan Vacchini

Keith J. Free

Judith Rayner

Colin Black

Richard Appleton

Terry Driscoll

John Greenstone (sic)

Jeremy Nelson

John K. McLaughlin

Barrie (?) Gillman (W.B.F.G.)
The Pauline Group, 5 April 1949

IMPROMPTU  
Reba Ginsburg

Hinting of the moonlight and of laughter in the rain:  
Wisps of jacinth veiling, a love song told in vain;  
Transient, enticing, like the shadows whipping free  
Before the taunting wind-god on a molten gale-swept sea.

Fragments of a memory, pure cadence of grief  
Mingled in a melody, that (touching once the brief  
Bright moment of eternity, ruby-warm with fire)  
Brushed now a swallow's wing against a dead desire.

LAMPS BEFORE DAWN  
Reba Ginsburg

The night is purple with the softness of pansies  
Leaning golden-eyed on the wet grass;  
Still, and tremulous as a lover:  
Unwilling, hesitant, yet on catching a breath  
Of the morning, rising to meet him  
Life a mist......  
In the distance, lamps glow sullenly,  
Angry hearts of light, burning in impotent rebellion  
Against the coming of the dawn.

LUTANA  
Roger Brown

This is our burden,  
And perhaps our victory,  
That with the puny  
We must achieve the great.  
The struggle for comprehension  
And for mastery seems triumphant,  
But blinds us with uncertain victories;  
We are bewildered  
And confused by happenings  
Stemming naturally from ourselves  
In the assuredness of our pride.  
The bright air will not be courted  
With slide rule and barometers;  
Will flirt, perhaps,  
Will show a fleeting acquiescence,  
But is ever fickle.  
And put it thus, that laws of wind and weather  
And the tall-piled clouds  
Overlook the factor  
Of the smallness of man's power  
Against a vast sky.  
Remembering, we make unwritten truce  
With the air;  
But, in the depths of our uncertainty,  
When that truce is broken  
We may defend, but not attack.  
The sea takes back its own;  
So too, the air  
Will snatch a life,  
Hurling the smoking wreckage  
Of plane and pilot earthwards.  
Torn and twisted dural  
On a lonely hillside,  
Charred bodies; are these  
The price of flight?

QUIET RIVER  
Roger Brown

He sat on the grass beside the river; sat down to think things over. The river was brown and very still, and there were a lot of things to think about. There were ducks on the river, swimming contentedly among the reeds, and occasionally they gave a queer mournful cry, though he could not see why a duck should be so sad on a river as brown and lazy as this one. But then perhaps ducks were like that, even if they didn't have anything to trouble them. Some of the ducks had bright feathers; he had seen some like that once before, but they were in a round stone pond, and he was eating an apple and he threw them a piece. There were pieces of biscuit in the water, and they would not eat the apple. Someone laughed, and said they were too well fed, but he wasn't sure whether it was that or not, though it was very nice apple. It was quite a big piece that he threw in, and it floated away to the middle of the pond. Perhaps the ducks found it afterwards and ate it. Some people had too much to live for; they did not know which to choose. They were angry then sometimes, angry with themselves and everyone else. But these ducks were contented, and the river was brown and very still.

The grass was soft, and the clouds were gathering in the east. Perhaps it was going to rain, and the grass would be wet, and the ducks would disappear among the reeds when the rain was heavy. Though perhaps ducks like to stay out in heavy rain. Weather for ducks.

There was a flurry of spray and beating of wings; two ducks were fighting, squabbling over some piece of food. The other ducks took no notice of them; they were too busy just being sleek and contented, and after all, why should they take any notice when the river was brown and still, and only the ducks themselves made ripples across it? They were quiet again now; the trouble was over very quickly, but his trouble was not like that. It had come so slowly and imperceptibly that he had not seen it, but he knew now that something had come between them. Something that neither of them could explain, but very real. He knew he loved her as he had not been able to love her before, but he could sense that he had lost her now, and that she was gone from his life as quietly as she had entered it. Only the memories of the silly lovely things that they had done together would remain, and soon they would be lost in the rattle of the city trains and the sly looks and stupid laughter of the girls at the office.

They had sat by the river once before; there ere no ducks then. Perhaps they went away in the winter, or it might be that they were round the bend in the river. It had rained then, but it was pleasant misty rain, and her hair was bright with shining points of rain. But only when they were going home and her hair sparkled under the glare of the street lights. Her hair was beautiful; he could not say why, but it was part of him to know that it was beautiful. She should be sitting there beside him now, and it would begin to rain, and her hair would sparkle with diamond points of rain, and they would stand under a clump of trees until the rain had almost stopped. But she was not there, and he could feel the rain coming, and smell the fresh sharp smell in the air. Soon the wind would come and it would begin to rain; a light mist of rain would blow across the river like a swift shadow, and he would stand under the trees, until it had stopped, but he would stand there alone; she would not be with him. And then he would walk back across the thick wet grass to the bridge, and wait for the bus. It would be getting dark then, and even now he felt hungry. The ducks were gone; at least he could not see them. Perhaps they were hungry too and had gone home, which was absurd, because their food was all about them, and they did not need to go home when they were hungry.

He was sitting on the grass and he was hungry, and he wished that he was at the little shop near the station, where they had often had tea together. It had to be near the station, because she went by train to have drawing lessons; on Monday she would go into the city to the art school there with some of her work and perhaps she might win one of the scholarships to the art school. They had missed their bus one night and had walked to the station, and she had said that if she won a scholarship they would both be working in the city. The art school was not far away, and it was next to a clothing factory with a big neon sign outside it.

It was as though they had never been strangers, and as if they had never met, for they had no need to meet, they had known each other always. There had been a time when he did not know her, but it seemed a long time ago and was not really a part of his life. He did not know how she had come into his life, but she had been there, and he was content. Other people fell into love, or drifted gradually into love, but for them there had been no need, for it was as though they had always loved, and their lives had been linked so that they might find each other, and be content, for it had always been so.

He could feel the wind pour down from the cold hills now; the river was dulled by tiny ripples dancing across it, and then he saw the ducks again, swimming in regular array like a convoy of ships. At home he had a model of a sailing ship, but he had been too young for the Navy all through the war, and his father said it would be better for him to work in the city now. Perhaps his father knew best, but it was a very fine model of a sailing ship, and he had often been sailing in a dinghy with a friend from school. But he would not have met her if he had joined the Navy.

It had been quiet by the river, and she was quiet and gentle too and not like the girls at the office. He wondered if he could ever really know one of them, and whether there was anything to know at all underneath their smart talk and manner. But they were just girls from the office, and she had become a part of himself in his life, and of his understanding.

It had been, and now was not. It had come just as everything else had come, and he could feel now that it must end as inevitably as it had begun. They had not quarreled, as the ducks had fought and quarreled for food, but he knew that she was gone as surely as he had known that he loved her when she had first come into his life. He had thought that it was impossible, and he found now that there was something against which he could not fight in her going. Rain was falling over the town, and a few drops fell on his coat and lay there glistening. The ducks were still there, and they looked a little forlorn, and he was sorry for them, though he could not have said why.

It was raining quite heavily as he picked his way across to the shelter of the trees, and then he saw her coming across the grass, and he knew that he had been wrong. Her white shoes were muddy and they stood underneath the trees until the shower had passed, and he knew that she had never really gone away. He did not envy the ducks now; he saw them swimming near the bridge and then they disappeared among the reeds. They walked back across the bridge, saying nothing, for there was nothing that needed to be said in words, and the rain sparkled in her hair.

Take such a night.

Take such a night as this,  
When streets are shining  
Under the lights, and leaves are dark  
On branches heavy with rain; when  
Clouds aflicker with hot lightning  
Mark the passing of a summer storm;  
Forget all but the important things  
And those which do not matter:  
These are real.  
Let your eyes find mine with laughter  
In the living night, and let  
Forever and forever be a dream  
Which passes quickly, for a moment  
Is true eternity.

FREEDOM  
Gwen West

Silken thread patiently unwound,  
And caught from branch to branch of tree  
Extended  
Floating softly on the morning air;  
Intricate pattern like a lacy shawl  
All glistening in the morning dew  
And waiting...  
A tiny insect, pausing lightly,  
With fluttering wings is caught. Its flight  
Is ended.  
Yet not alone it waits its sad demise,  
For soon the web is filled with other wings,  
And waiting hidden in the covering leaves,  
The Spider!

With pity filled to set them free,  
I raise my hand to reach and break  
The web.  
But covering all, the long grey shroud  
Is floating silently away -  
A large black spider cheated of  
Its prey.

Thus life unfolds before me now,  
As I reflect how once was I  
As free -  
Now caught and held by silken thread  
And slowly pining. The web is slashed...  
And I the Human fly, am I  
Set free again?

LONELINESS  
Gwen West

When I awake lonely in the night,  
And all the fearsome passions awake in me,  
Which I must wrestle with alone -  
No Holy Comforter, No splendid vision  
To calm my fears:  
I am alone!

Who shares my joys and waking hours,  
When fresh from having gained some grand achievement,  
A sharp exultant joy possesses me?  
There's none to share!

And in my grief,  
Who knows the penitent tears I shed alone,  
When friendship's broken or loved one dead?  
I pass along without my God -  
Alone!

WITH THE LOSS OF MY TRIBE  
Bill Belson

When I awake from the bells ringing,  
And the turning of wheels,  
And the beat of machines,  
And the weeping of hearts -  
The in the chill I do arise,  
I shall go down to the sea and walk out,  
I shall go deep in ground.

When I awake from the throw of the wind  
And the husk of the tree,  
And the lights on the water dancing in my gaiety -  
When I awake from these -  
I shall go to the stars.

I can only say,  
In the shreds of my tribe  
That there is no sea hill  
And no high crag  
That has such air as I breathe now -  
That has its chill.

Can only tell  
That in the tumult of things falling down on me,  
That I still stand  
Gaunt in huge solitude,  
A pygmy flickering in the myriad stars.

Can only say  
That with my gunya gone  
And the city in dust,  
That a cold wind dwells in me,  
Twining round in a sort of cruel glee.

And me!  
Me, I exult and sing:  
Dusting leaves and cathedrals off my hands,  
Sobbing in the heart,  
Lost in the brain.  
Me, I exult and sing!

FROM "CAFÉ CHARACTERS"  
Bill Belson

This fellow had a most peculiar way of drinking tea. I would say he ate it. All the way down to the corners of his mouth, all the way down from his ears, long wrinkles ran. For he chewed his tea right back to his ears. Been doing it for years... He had a kind of double action – a kind of making sure that nothing went down un-thoroughly masticated – un-thoroughly – chewed. In the warm swirl, in the pressurization of tea, this chaste old fellow ate his tea from ear to ear.

THIS IS THE SMILE  
Bill Belson

This is the flush of young flesh,  
This is the smile;  
How long it will last,  
How long a heart will smile,  
I do not say.

But this is true:  
That warm eyes  
And exulting hearts  
Have a way  
Of fading.  
Time bears such ashes on its tide -  
It bears away such smiles.

A STONE IN THE WAY  
L.J. Pierce

'Tis early morning yet  
But the mason is at work:  
Tap tap tap tap  
On the stone.

There is a hammer swinging,  
A chisel's ringing,  
There is a rock defying,  
A man replying.

He leans to what he is destroying  
Like a lover with a loved one toying:  
But the eye is calculating  
At the chisel's mating.

'Tis not the sun your angles warming,  
'Tis the fierce bleed of a vulture storming.  
And 'tis no shaping into beauty  
But performing of a daily duty.

You are in the way of the factory workers,  
Making the energetic into shirkers,  
With a flare in imagination  
Of turning you into a new creation.

You make the girls reach the office past nine,  
And the housewife miss the line,  
The student disregard the book:  
Meddling no business mind must brook.

SACRIFICIUM  
Judith Hartnett

I want to lie on the edge of the universe,  
On the purple rim of the world,  
With the moon's heavy orb on my ankles,  
And a tangle of stars in my hair:  
With the blue of the sea to swathe me,  
A cluster of songs at my throat,  
A girdle of floating laughter,  
And my wrists tied down with dreams.

But there, while seas of silence  
Past me ebb and flow,  
A tall and reticent arch-priest  
His altar shall prepare;  
And when the pulse of throbbing time  
Has caught its beat  
And stopped:  
Then with his knife of faith,  
Slow-cutting deep my body,  
Sensuous and tired,  
He'll draw from there  
With fingers mystery-tipped,  
My quivering, eager soul,  
And to the earth return it,  
A restless of beauty,  
Renewed and undefiled.

And when he has finished with the sacrifice,  
And I lie like a shell at his feet  
He will lift me with arms of thunder,  
And over the rim of the world  
Into infinity's depths, he will toss me  
With moon's heavy orb on my ankles  
And a tangle of stars in my hair.  
The Mad-girl's Song to Plebas

I looked for you over the world my love;  
I waited and watched by the sea:  
I hunted the hills and the plains, my love;  
I knew you were waiting for me.

My ear caught your voice in the wind, my love,  
My throat felt the touch of your hand;  
My body was waiting for yours my love,  
When the spring lay abed with the land.

And now I have found you alone my love;  
But the weeds are wound up in your hair:  
Ah! Why are your lips so blue, my love,  
And your skin so pallid and fair.

Your eyelids are closed and so calm my love;  
There's a film of sand on your brow,  
And where on your breast I would lie, my love,  
A sea-shell is nestling now.

And now I am sure you are dead, my love,  
I knew it would have to be so.  
I'll lift you up close to my heart my love,  
And down to the sea we will go.

And when the chill moon shall arise my love,  
And shine on the skin-smooth sand,  
I'll walk from the sand to the sea, my love,  
And sink with you, hand in hand.

REHABILITATION  
Winsome Latter

Little one...  
the bubbled laughter  
running from your lips  
like water from a vessel overturned,  
spills itself  
within the desert of my mind,  
and springs to life  
the seeds of faded years.

Your joyous sounds  
reach out beyond the edge of time  
and echo back  
in surge of thought...  
my youth.

In drifting mood I touch,  
across the waste of war-spent years,  
the golden dreams that once were mine.

Laugh on, O baby girl...  
as through your fluted voice, I grope  
in anguished doubt,  
my weary aimless way  
to hope.
The Pauline Group, 29 June, 1949

THE FARM  
L.J. Pearce.

Inland the black soil becomes red and the cloudy sky cloudless: blue like oiled steel it spreads a merciless dome like a blade over the earth: an ironical blessing. There is no rain here to milch the earth into loam as it lies along the sea. It is a flat hard strand; and through it runs the dry hard channel of the road to the north that carries despite its still waterless red stare a trifle of the flotsam of men occasionally against the defended island of a farmers home.

He blows through the wall of trees unnoticed, whose slender traceries of boughs like vines trellis their leaves down to earth where, dumb in the shade a bird stands, and but replaces a curled foot at his passing. The shade aggrieves him. Unnoticed, the pagan flowers, nursed on his sacred water, with their full eyes and bright faces, and perfume haven for bees, as he bends past, in his chink eyes and fore vision of the all dispensing matron, the farmer's wife.

His rags are like ears about him. He is not perspiring. He has lost his water and is hard like the road he travels along, and where his joints work, like stones, brown and unscratched by the sun, on the bank of his pillow.

A glance at the house and he knocks at the door. Now, at the oilcloth he bows to the thick tea, while the aproned bosom within lights with love that can pay its debt to mankind with adroitly packed meals for the rough mouth without. His pack grows round in her hands. The tea swills the road down his throat.

There beauty in the great garment of trees that the distance wears that only the eagle sees. There is beauty in the wide flock of sheep that dribbles corrosively over the pipy grass that only the farmer sees. There is beauty in the Pepper tree in the garden only the hand sees. He picks the small green berries with the tips of his thumb and finger and rubs the hard pips in them free and slippery between them and smells his fingers, and believes that it is the only thing that blesses him here.

The young horses are in the hands of a young teamster. They are afraid of him because he doesn't mind it, and even believes it good for them to hurt them. They never know when such a belief is coming over him; and so, out of fear, they go before him. That does not prevent their feeling proud, and prancing like the nags of princes, out in the rays of the dawning light, through the gates of their coming home; or their including him in their liking of air, that he gulps down with a yawn to expand with the joys of the dazzling day.

All day long their feet will pursue the uno'eturned earth. And one from afar, turning after half a day, will see the hill-side transformed like a face by the burning sun. With the sun on their heads, he behind will relent, and make a fire on the earth with some sticks that once carried food to the high flung billows of trees. Nose bags are slung with the chaff and sweet oats after the gulps drawn out from the trough filled from the well by the lad.

A ritual path in three stems is trodden by the hoops of a cart and the shoes of a horse every day, when the sun unclasping the morning, exposes his fierceness, like a lion, his cubs and mate dropping behind him. The hand's in the cart with his bum on the edge, which a bump makes wipe off the dust from the vanishing wheel. He feels the sun on his back and the leather of reins in his hand, and looks at the sky in the west that's blue like a painted sky. Rooks rise out of the red earth. Shallow depressions are cracked as though by a personal earthquake, showing they are wont to hold a lens of water. The horse is agog till the sheep visions rise, when with slack reins he stops.

The hand is thinking of the snouts of the sheep and the countless lips lifting to rifle the bin he is going to replenish. He looks at the couple of bags and smiles with delight for the big share of oats he carries for them, the sheep, who are so loathe to be frightened when a thin stream of fat oats crawls into their dish of thin chaff.

Now there's returning with eyes o'erlidden and low. The sun's down already with darkness pursuing. The tramp is tasting the stuff in his bag with the city above lighting up. The hand, with a book, waits for the supper bell to ring. The teamster lingers in the stables with its tent flap of stars, brushing with nerveless arms the flanks of his horses, and the smell of the teeth-milled oats allaying his hunger.

TRUTH  
L.J. Pearce

My enemies are my father and mother;  
If I could charm them with my song,  
If I could stop their thrashing me  
And their fighting one another,  
I should be able to go to the party and dance,  
And singing and talking would never lie vain.  
I should be able to welcome the stranger  
Brought to my spot in the country by chance.

SONNET  
L.J. Pearce

The earth in sifting mote on mote away  
To bring pure beauty into common clay,  
Transmuting mould to mould and form to form  
Through fish and bird and beast till man be born,  
At last her spheral fingers drop aside  
From woman's race her last content and pride.  
But ere she has been idle long, she dreams  
Of still surpassing what the highest seems:  
But not with newer races can she make  
Her highest dream of beauty image take.  
They would it break. One soul from out the old  
Must be informed with all the vision told.  
You were the form earth found to be most kind  
To take the imprint of her highest mind.

THE CENOTAPH  
Norris Devir

This cenotaph;  
This list of names of men,  
Whose lives leaked out of them  
Through gaps of wounds man-made;  
Whose leaking lives delayed  
Enough for those to pray who prayed,  
For these to curse who knew no prayer;  
Or grab black handfuls of mud  
Made from the dust and their leaking blood,  
And fling it angry in the air  
As far as the weakened arm could throw.

Some died and did not know.

There are some whose lips  
Were stopped by their own death-spew  
Manning the sunken battleships,  
A futile, naked crew;  
Or lolling about on the floors of the deep  
They roll and roll in restless sleep  
As smooth tongues of water lick them,  
Too deep for nibble teeth to pick them.

It is a hard death to die,  
Breathing water instead of air,  
To feel the sponge of lung swell in the chest,  
And the heart fumble, like lips, in despair.

Men's hearts have stopped with fright  
When in the searchlight's pointing stars  
Their plane lurched sideways in the night  
And plummeted out of the air.

Body functions vomit  
When the air opens up its mouth  
And sucks the victim down,  
In spinning spiral descent.

Cramped in crumpled cubby-holes  
They simply sit and wait,  
Till the ground leaps at them, and death  
Bangs like a door in the face.

There was a mother who learned at the door  
That her only son was killed at the war.  
No selfish tears start from the eyes  
Like blood from a sudden wound;  
Her grief went deeper than tears.  
She shows no outward sign of having bled  
But rapier words stabbed her somber heart;  
Her mind fluttered and fumbled with faces,  
Each one in smiles or sadness, her son.  
And her lips that smiled are dead.

There was a father who guessed the worst  
But disbelieved himself, fearing the truth.

His mind went uttering idiot words  
Flicking on and off like sparks;  
He did not try to understand their meaning,  
Thoughts would age him mind and heart.  
The truth seeped through his shallow barrier;  
It was a slow thrust that pierced his heart  
But deep, but deep to the core.  
And blood turned grey in his veins.  
There was a wife whose loss seemed vague  
Till the days stretched into weeks and months.

The bed beside her grew cold like a corpse;  
The hollowness in her room took shape,  
Had being, and breathed; but did not sleep.  
She was eager to answer the door  
In the hope that there was some mistake;  
She kept her rings on here widowed hand,  
Still wedded to dust and a name.

There was a child who did not understand.  
These casualties of war  
Cannot bandage up their wounds  
And stop the naked bleeding;  
Their scars are on their minds and hearts,  
Cut by words and missing faces.  
There is a hollowness where someone was,  
Who was uprooted by the sudden rush of metal  
Through the yielding flesh white-hot;  
Or a blunt incision of blackness.  
They wait in empty rooms  
Hearing the ghostly shell of words  
Uttered again in their minds  
By tongues and lips that stopped and rotted away.  
They keep scraps of the soul alive,  
That was plucked from the body  
Or eased slowly out through their lips;  
They have given refuge  
To these vagrant scraps of mind.  
Their scars are slow to heal;  
They bleed again, like broken lips of wounds,  
When memory rubs rough fingers  
Along the length of grooves, to feel  
If forgetfulness has healed the gap.

There is no cenotaph for them.

REMINISCENCE  
Jim Lance

In the years to come will our minds wander back,  
And amble through the passages of Time,  
Seeing dimly by memory's flickering lamp  
Vague shapes revealed by the side of that uncertain track,  
And things forgotten, covered by the grime  
Of creeping years?

And in some place of beauty rest at last,  
Some remembered valley where a stream  
Of reminiscence flows?  
Shall we find happiness hidden in the past  
Or see no pleasure, haunted in an empty dream  
By rising fears?

And shall we search in vain for loveliness,  
Roam a life dusty and bare  
Where no flowers of beauty lie,  
Viewing life of no achievement, no success,  
Gaunt with hungry trees that will not blossom there,  
And they fly, bewildered, by  
A lake of tears?

THE TOWN  
Jim Lance

To the days all days are one –  
The same day played again  
Five times a week:  
The same trams in filthy noise,  
Tracks worn thin on wooded blocks,  
And moving roads, the swaying crowds  
Hot and sweaty.  
Paper boys, their faces hid  
By the tenseness of age,  
Clothes as dirty as their feet,  
Break raucous voiced –  
Trade their childhood for the mob's pennies  
While yesterday's papers flap in the gutter  
And the mob no wiser.

PATTERNS OF EVENING  
Jim Lance

Tree patterns forming in a tangled net of light,  
Falling with the shadows into spreading pools of night,  
As colours from the graying hills are lifted to the sky,  
The fires of sunset glimmer when the day is loathe to die.

Cloud patterns forming, by the evening breezes tossed,  
'Til the afterglow has vanished, and its opal tints are lost.  
The sightless tide is rising, and the darkened skyline fills  
The last remaining paleness stretched out along the hills.

ILLAWARRA  
Jim Lance

She has a history hidden in her,  
Deep as coal in her rich earth;  
Hid so deep, grown so old –  
Fierce tales yet untold.  
Her stretching coast has formed a stage  
Where men might live and die  
Against a scene of splendid hills –  
A dam to hold the sky.

The stage was bare when time was small,  
Quietly then, the story started;  
Nomads made their entrance first,  
Unknowing altars, unrehearsed –  
Then their families, then their tribes  
And generations more  
Made their camps and spent their lives  
Between these hills and shore.

Through the years black men lived there,  
Named the mountains high above,  
Named the foothills spilling down,  
Named their camps but built no town.  
They left the forests as they were,  
They let the grasslands be,  
They were content to wander  
Where the mountains met the sea.  
One Autumn day a sharpeyed watch  
Saw "Endeavour" pass the coast –  
A god of winds was sailing there,  
A god of sea moved by the air.  
They could not know this was a sign  
The end had now begun  
Of simple life, by golden traces  
Harnessed to the sun.

While Illawarra kept her secrets  
Intruders settled to the North –  
A prison built by a foreign hand;  
An ugly start in a new-found land.  
Each material was there  
To build a sordid nation –  
The lash and gibbet for its shield  
A gaol for its foundation.

Illawarra saw her barriers  
Broken by exploring hands –  
The sunrise of another day  
In soldier red and convict grey.  
Thus opened up a chapter  
Of the happy and the cruel;  
The pioneer and the plunderer,  
The farmer and the fool.  
They stripped her graceful hills of cedar,  
Searched her pleasant slopes for coal.  
They came to live and stayed to die,  
Part of the earth they'd trespassed by.  
But the wilderness was furrowed,  
The crops were heavier with richer yields.  
To balance the scars of 'Progress'  
Were the farms, the cattle, the greener fields.

Even in the bitter struggle  
For very life in the convict days,  
Eager minds saw far ahead  
Out of an age that is better dead.  
To them we owe our easy way  
The years have slowly grown –  
The men who faced the vastness  
Of the terrible unknown.

Feel the spirit of Illawarra –  
Stories rising from the soil –  
Shadow pictures grey and cold  
As the plays of men unfold.  
She will show her mysteries  
To any sympathetic eye  
Flying from the years that hold them,  
Pageantry of time gone by.

IN THE YEARS  
Bill Belson

They wring out our hearts  
And leave us  
These whisps,  
These sweets of song,  
These leaves.

They touch us with tender cruel fingers  
In the years,  
These smiles,  
These eyes,  
These moons.

And we with tears  
And a wrench of longing,  
Remember them...  
And now they are gone  
Like leaves.

ANOTHER VERSION OF HEROISM  
Bill Belson

Heroism is nothing like an Epic Figure. The great character standing on the brink of doom, the traveller in the proud lonely places, the flyer close to the stars, the victor with the singing sword – these pretty scenes, though they stir us to passion, are nothing like heroism at all.

In the first place, the character on the brink of doom would be weak in the head to stay there and stupidly passionate to risk his one and only life in ever going near it. And in any case, history hasn't any record of a great character in this situation. It has only selfish little big-shots putting everything on a plunge.

In the case of the traveller in the proud lonely places, it is well to remember that just behind him in a camp littered with empty condensed milk tins, and that as likely as not there is a history of dysentery behind him. Generally we get this picture through some carefully costumed city slicker – and a model at that – going to the local sandhill and posing in good story – book fashion. I suggest that the grubby explorer is as sick as hell of the whole stupid thing and wishes he was back by a nice friendly fireside with an earthly woman and an earthly vision of heaven in a plate of steak and eggs. He notes with great conviction that the lonely places are proud only when you ar'n't in them.

And then, taking the victor with the singing sword, let me tell you that the victor who had personally done anything (and not the ninety percent of warriors who do nothing) would be wishing he had time to change his stinking linen and certainly wouldn't be wiggling his silly sword. He would be hoping like terror that the battle would end because he was deadly scared and quite sure that the next victory couldn't possibly be his own. He was just plain lucky to get away with it once.

As a matter of fact, such heroic figures – the Ruby type of thing – or the grim man with the bayonet – are in the long run the concoctions of war mongers and perfume manufacturers and are aimed at creating suckers or snarling ready-made fools. And in the short run they are the inspired output of a set of somewhat effeminate artists unconsciously aimed at enticing the little pansy out of the parlour and the suburban bully into uniform; they please our dear gentle ladies, and no doubt they give the artist a chance to imagine himself as something he would never have the stomach to be.

When I think of heroism, I do not vision epic figures. Rather, I see an over-worked woman hanging out napkins. Perhaps, even, the very fat man busting his boiler to catch the local train to get to his box of an office in time. I think of heroism as essentially bound up with small-timers doing something too big for them and getting the jitters about it. The frightened soldier, the man working on with the 'flu, two people going on with a farce of a marriage because of the children, travelling in and out of the city with the obscene crowd, making the money spin out, and so on for all the trifles of the irritating and maddening day.

Nobody bothers to paint this type of heroics – the small-time monkey – faced little human in trouble. We set up some symbol much bigger than we are, doing things we would never do ourselves – unless it be in dreams – or the cinema. The symbol has always a smattering of likeness to ourselves (both it and we have legs) in order that we may make the swift and happy transition of identification.

And the sadness of it all we go on living for the epic tomorrow, getting no kick out of our very own day to day victories, missing the little beautiful things because all our models for happiness are huge imaginary symbols far beyond us. This is simply putting satisfaction out of our reach. If I put god in a worm and a piece of steak, then I constantly have the company of god, if I put eternity into today, then I have eternal life; if great happiness be a little moments laughter, then happiness I have. And if I kick out the ham actors on the brink of doom and change my picture of heroism into me doing things, then here in my own back yard I am a hero. And whatever joys I may have in heroism will be mine in a trouble overcome, in pain endured, and in a hard job concluded.

POEM  
L.J. Pearce

I've tried my love.  
She will not fall:  
Too virtuous is she.  
I love her more  
She more denies  
And more reproaches me.

So as I flame  
She cooler grows  
And better feeds my fire.  
But if she burned,  
Our double flame  
Would cancel my desire.

So youth in love  
Your maiden's front  
Cherish like your life.  
If on your breast she 'gins to melt,  
Kiss her and say goodnight.
The Pauline Group, 19 May 1949

SAND THROUGH MY FINGERS  
Roger F. Brown

The Boy:  
Fling a stone  
Into the cool, clear water, and watch the  
Ripples widening, spreading, spreading,  
See the wind-blown petals  
Rocking gently on the farther shore,  
And listen. Listen to the sharp cry  
Of the parrot, and airwards see  
The bright flash of feathers.

The Girl:  
I see and I listen. I listen  
And I see the hawk's  
Cold swift descent;  
A puff of feathers in the calm air,  
Sad, gay, feathers, falling, falling.

The Boy:  
A man's death is as swift,  
But more than feathers float down  
To shiver on the rippled water.

The Girl:  
No, death is not thus,  
For death falls not so swiftly  
As the brown hawk; presage  
Of its flight casts flickering shadows  
Over all before it strikes,  
And striking, all those about  
Are withered by its touch.

The Boy:  
But stop;  
The moments tumble as the dancing shadows  
And are gone, slipping into  
The long sweep of the past,  
Which is no longer ours.  
There is for us  
So much to see,  
So much to feel,  
So much to do, and think;  
There is so much yet to live.

The Girl:  
The hawk swings timelessly  
On a breath of air.

The Boy:  
I must see again  
The grasses blowing on the windy hilltop,  
And your hair; the grass-ripple  
Of your hair in sun and wind.  
I must feel the cold sting  
Of the surf, white foam beating on  
Yellow sand hot to my feet.

The Girl:  
And the swaying intoxication  
Of the saxophone's insistent wail,  
Surging through star-powered darkness,  
Throbbing about us, but beyond.  
This too is remembered.

The Boy:  
All these things are to be remembered,  
The trivial finding place with all else  
In the hopes that are ours, with the  
Things of a time we cannot know.  
But think; the inevitable surge  
Of all-engulfing tide advances,  
Finding the secret places of our lives,  
Filling the hollows with blind hate,  
Sweeping away hope.  
The white-coated biologist working  
Into the night, the jungle of symbols  
In the mathematical thesis, the whirling  
Orbits within the atom's core;  
All point to the same end.  
These things are not ours, the tide  
Not of our making;  
Hopes slip away and are gone,  
Like sand through my fingers;  
There is so little time.

The Girl:  
The hawk hovers watching over the land;  
It shadow passes over all.

SUBWAY  
Roger F. Brown

One can remember the same thing with ants,  
Save that they show that haste, and  
That ferocity of purpose, more  
Than ants could ever show.  
The subway is alive with the  
Ceaseless clatter of their feet, which  
Drowns the railway noises from above,  
Makes speech impossible.  
A face brings back the same eyes  
Watching carefully in a class-room painted  
Cream and grey; the set of the shoulders,  
The hockey field when he was tall above us  
In our play.  
And then from standing, I am whirled  
Into the crowd for which  
All time is future;  
An army, and to each soldier  
His battle.

CAFÉ CHARACTERS (EXTRACT)  
Bill Belson

The waitress came to take his order...... His eyes took on quite a glisten, quite a shine. A soft whisper of adrenaline went running and a-cry in the soft bright way behind the lighting in his eyes. The Christ and the parlour and the teeming niceties came inhibiting in vain and lo, adrenaline flowed. His eyes were like hail- like brilliant rain. And looking at the waitress ad imaging - imagining beyond Christ and the parlour – they caught the sun – they caught five moons – and yea! AND YEA!

THE GHOSTS  
Bill Belson

We are the ghosts,  
Eating out our hearts,  
Sitting out the years  
With quiet sad brooding eyes,  
Away from the song and the laughing loud heart.  
We ghosts we  
With words to tear our throats  
In such silence.  
We sit on here  
While the fat laughing world goes by us  
With its blood and tears,  
And the woman has twins,  
The young flesh grows old.  
We sit on here,  
Growing old too,  
Regretting the absence of zest  
Brooding that there is only silence.  
We sit on here,  
Regretting,  
Lost in the tangle of words that have no meaning,  
Sad with our bitter-sweet ghosts.  
We sit  
While the tobacco burns,  
And the small slim wind lingers on the frail curtain,  
And a blue elbowed night broods on earth's table.  
We linger,  
Pale schizophrenes  
Lost in twining ghosts, in words,  
In oceans of sound,  
Glimpsing stars off a dunghill,  
Treading a circle round.

We are, in a way,  
Pickled flowers in a dry vase,  
Stale lamps in a night club  
As they peer at the gay circle,  
Wondering why it smiles.

AT SENLAC  
Neville Kirkby

Proudly the White Horse  
Paws the air,  
Wishing for battle to swirl  
Beneath its tread;  
And stirring to the fretful gusts of wind,  
Eyes the waiting warriors  
On the plain.

Horse, proud horse, woven with magical thread  
Into a banner of blue –  
Blue of the sky, symbol of greatness...

Banner, come from the sea beyond,  
Wrought of powers mystical  
In ages gone, and carried by  
Warriors into the land!

Odo, Bishop of Bayeux,  
Holds service in the Norman camp.  
From where he stands, he sees  
The waving Wessex dragon flag,  
Crimson gold, and glinting  
Jewel-drops of fire in the light of a new morn.  
This, the warrior bishop says,  
Is demon-blessed:  
And each man vows to slay  
Those who flaunt God's purity.

Yet there are those that think  
Of how to die, but yearn to live –  
Men who feel a coldness round  
Their hearts, and see un-natural things  
Lurking in the low-lying mist,  
Sombre, grey and deep.

They talk by themselves  
And their footsteps are a ghostly harmony  
Treading time away...

Taillefer, soldier-minstrel, lovingly touches  
The strings of his harp,  
Waking music in the heart of war;  
And his own voice, that natural instrument,  
Sings a tale of chivalry  
And comfort.

Duke William, roused by the climbing sun,  
Marshals the army  
To fight beneath the blessing of St. Peter,  
And their ensign, holy, papal-blessed.

The harp and voice are hushed,  
The clank of steel on steel  
Sounds in their stead.  
The minstrel, armed and mailed,  
Is troubadour no more.

William of Normandy  
Grips with an iron fist  
The hilt of his brand.

Orders pass from line to line;  
Odo swings his gold-wrought axe,  
Ready to strike for the faith;  
And Taillefer, thinking of horse of old,  
Takes joy in the movement of his steed;  
Tall men, wing-helmeted and fair,  
Mount the palisade upon the hill...

A rhythmic thunder rolls heavenwards,  
Sunlight flashes on clustered spears,  
And busy bloodied spurs.  
The wave of horsemen crash upon the Saxon shore,  
Foam up in a whirl of steel,  
Recede, re-form and charge again!

The minstrel's heart awakes;  
He sings of Roland of Roncevalles,  
The right of serving one's own true ideal  
Even to death, and after death to After-life.  
Sweetly, clearly, his song rises,  
More powerful than a trumpet call.  
And smiting, Taillefer in his turn is smitten  
And sinks down to rest  
With the song upon his lips.

...And it is said by some  
That his spirit stayed that day,  
After the body was still,  
And saw the crimson dragon fall  
At the sunset of the Wessex kings...

TALKING WITH STARS IN HER TEETH  
Bill Belson

Simper, simper...  
Strong...  
\- I wave my fingers strong  
As steel,  
As god.

Simper, simper...  
Sad.  
I droop my eyes,  
Modest,  
Shy.

Talk...  
Talk loud...  
Garrulous and loud.

I said,  
I told him I did...

The coloured ribbons  
On the trellis  
Waved and trembled  
In the backyard breeze,  
And a small cat  
Went mewing...  
Far away I saw a star  
Through a battery of toast strips  
And clamping jaws.  
And the eternal tinkle and trim  
Of a musician's white keys  
Told me how shut-in we were –  
How encompassed by coloured streamers  
And white keys,  
We were.

Whimsical droop of an over-fat jaw,  
Forlorn as a boy in a tall chair.  
Nodding wise head  
And a roving eye  
To see –  
To make sure –  
That everyone understood  
How wise she was,  
And how she knows  
All earth's sorrows and joys,  
And how, in this little can of a place,  
She was living them out.

Between her talking jaws,  
I watched the star  
Sneaking into this hemmed-in -  
This white-keyed  
Jangling.

SHED  
Bill Belson

Her buttocks were as wide -  
Oh, so wide...  
And presently she crossed her legs  
And lit a cigarette,  
Sucking it most  
Consciously.

I saw a child  
With wide bright eyes  
Watching stars.

The fat lady,  
The one with the huge chest,  
Was looking at her bill,  
Thinking how dear it was  
To sit here  
In her summer frock  
In the company of white-keys,  
Blinking her knowing eyes,  
Crossing her legs  
And looking -  
God!  
How wise!

LOOK NOW  
June Hartnett

Look now, how the sunlight laps the window ledge,  
And the wattle in the bowl  
Takes September's fire to that dark corner;  
And there SHE lies who will soon be dead.

\-- Her youth and mine were twined together  
Like two stems of ivy on an old red wall --  
But there she lies now.

Time's scratch upon her forehead  
Is the furrowed echo  
Of the grooves Time's hand has etched  
Along her sweet-wax throat.  
Her hands are blotched and veined,  
That once, upon their finger's ends,  
Wore each its own five pearls;  
And blurred her eyes  
That my forgotten words  
Made glow  
Like fire in the opal's heart.  
Only the twilight now  
Lurks in her hair.  
Her skin, that held the tint  
That hides in the white-rose heart  
Is now the aged-in-ivory parchment  
Where Time has scrawled his petty repetitions,  
That pain has smudged and fear has crumpled...

And His soul lies in the window ledge,  
Ready for using.

There were rich-textured hours  
Of hands' and lips' community,  
Shared nights, and days, and years.  
And all remaining are my memory's  
Tenuous fibres, and her last swift decay.

She is but little now.  
We shall both be less.  
And all I see is youth's apostasy,  
And the sun upon the window ledge.

UNSEXED  
Winsome Latter

Poor little bitch,  
you stand in the triumph of the knife,  
desexed,  
and turned aside from  
Nature's flowing stream.

Less than the smallest bee  
that swings to join  
in wisdom's wake,  
the mighty surge of life.

No yearning breasts for you  
to give sweet milk  
to some small doggie world,  
no ecstasy for you to feel  
puppies fat and warm  
against your heart.

You will not sound  
the soft love growl  
reproaching some excited son  
for biting at your ear.

You'll never know the dear content  
Of washing time,  
Of drubbing clean your puppy flock  
for pride's display;  
or this  
the feel of tiny clutching paws,  
as slithering forms  
play games along your fur.

He is not man  
who held the mutilating blade,  
he made of you  
what he himself becomes,  
through his damned deed...  
a thing!

SPANISH DANCE  
Reba Ginsburg

Black, black, with a crimson lining:  
Sweep, leap, dark hair shining;  
Bend, blend, in a curving passion,  
Framed in the loop of a rich skirt twining.

Dance, glance, with a rhythmic swaying;  
Round, round, ardently obeying;  
Black, red, in a moon of colour,  
Splashed with the sound of castanets playing.

MEMORY'S CARGO  
Reba Ginsburg

In thought I see  
needles of stone that scratch an oriental sky;  
and with them  
comes a cry as old and faint as Allah,  
drowned in distance.

Three figures, veiled, pass through the haze,  
are lost among the writhing mass of little streets,  
and far into the background of my mind  
they pass inconsequent.

I have forgotten.........

Only pictures live, sent back by Time:  
refuse left behind by memory;  
a nameless cargo that the mind holds still  
as if, caught in a cobweb, these last shreds  
hang tattered by the breeze of thought.

Some tang of colour clings and will not fade,  
but name and meaning are illusive.

I cannot follow them, but only in the quiet hours  
shake out the web, and look  
at these lost phantoms.

Thus they took their way  
under white towers of eastern pride, and thus  
they vanished.

THE GOLDEN WHISTLER  
Reba Ginsburg

I have sung songs that lay,  
pearl-tinctured on the evening;  
songs that fell in star-drops on the gums  
and blossomed there.

Into the bush I have poured melodies of silk,  
cascading down sun-placid rocks,  
rustling through dim gullies,  
and gathering in iridescent pools in cool hollows  
where idle sun-echoes  
strike silver in the sand.

I have sung songs  
from the sun-drenched hills;  
songs falling in compassion on the amber plains  
and filling the billabongs with forgotten magic.

But now my songs are done,  
and the bush waits, lonely and quiet;  
my voice is a memory,  
glinting on the bark, stirring the leaves  
with a furtive tenderness -  
and only the wind cries through the listening gums.

GHOST GUMS  
Reba Ginsburg

Where the green tide breaks against the hills  
In a foam of wattle, and silence  
Takes the world for sleeping:  
There, shining under the moon  
Like spirits floating  
Through the green and shadowed hills  
The ghost gums linger, worshipping  
The stars.

Lean, cloud-bodied, alert against the wind:  
The only things waking;  
Pale reincarnations, haunting  
The bush, where once they moved,  
Strong-limbed, gleaming  
Black shadows in sunlight,  
Hunting.

TRIBAL IMAGERY  
Winsome Latter

Old wrinkled one,  
Nodding by the dying embers of your fire,  
I Nadarna,  
Daughter of your first man-child,  
Bring you happiness to share......

Last night I dreamed  
I saw a water-lily, growing  
On the desert plain, past Nullanum,  
Far from its gentle water home.

I stooped to shade it from the burning sun  
And brushed its sadness with my lips,  
And crouching there,  
I felt it slip into my heart.

O... ee... old mother,  
I have a flower now,  
Hiding from the angry sun  
Within my form.

Do you hear the petals moving there  
Against my heart?  
Soon it will leave the garden of my flesh  
And lie upon my breath  
Transformed,  
A man-child of my own.

Old one, do you sleep?  
You are so cold and still......  
Still as the paling star above the wind......

TOKEN  
Winsome Latter

Have you ever seen  
In half-dream consciousness  
(That leans upon the waking mind)  
In early dawn time of the coming day,  
A misty image  
Designed across the purple darkness  
Of your sleep's tranquility?

An image some enchanted knowledge makes your own,  
Of starry heights you have attained  
Throughout the night;  
Of cloud-built cosmic slopes you climbed  
With beings clothed in light,  
Near and warmly comforting......  
The image of a midnight sun,  
Soft-glowing in a frame of velvet space, star-grained,  
That seems to be the dwelling place of Gods.

Perhaps you have:  
This is a token you can hold within your heart,  
Against the daytime doubting of the intellect  
That reasons to disprove the soul's release,  
When death identifies our flesh with dust.

You hold within your heart  
The image and token of your immortality!

TO THE EARTH  
Winsome Latter

When you have spilled your virgin dawns  
Along a thousand years, like meteors,  
And gathered unborn islands from the sea  
To grace your form...... I will return.

Return to hear my tone of destiny  
Echo through the running wind  
On fragrant slopes;  
To seek again the living mysteries  
That wisdom shields behind your measured ways.

I'll come again  
To satiate my spirit with the fires  
Of all your loveliness and life,  
And strange desires.

Ten centuries  
I'll hold my consciousness,  
Within the vibrant womb of space  
Then incarnate...  
And feel the grass about my feet,  
The friendly summer rain against my face.

LAMENT  
Winsome Latter

No more the winds of heaven sing  
Of fair Olympus to the lonely dawn,  
Now muted is the poem of earth's delight;  
The Gods who gathered there are gone.

No more the perfumed day  
Is gladdened by the throated dove;  
A heavy silence weighs the saddened air,  
And cold, ah cold, is love.

The golden sun  
No more reflects the beauty and the grace  
Of sweet Olympian maids  
To mortal face.

Zeus is expelled...... to Pluto's regency!  
Banished by the subtle minds of men  
He haunts the shades of cold eternal night,  
Powerless, with only aching dreams  
To tell him of his lost Olympian might.

But we, who stripped the Springtime from the slopes,  
And quelled the laughter and the song  
That danced along the breeze, earth-driven,  
Who stilled the floating music  
Clothed in tones of coloured light,  
Have rent the rainbow  
Arching man to heaven.

And with solemn dignity  
And hearts mechanical,  
Have raised another God to rule our worth;  
And now, in place of Zeus, a mighty robot sits,  
And creaks his orders  
To a jerking earth.

BLUE MOUNTAINS  
Winsome Latter

I would rather scan your loveliness  
This, way...  
Eyes passing by the darkening foothill,  
to watch the beauty of you  
in this silent hour,  
than intrude myself.

This way...  
my eyes can mirror back to you  
pink veils of sunset  
draped about your pensive brow,  
and all the petalled clouds  
that nestle down  
against the blueness of your gum-tipped gown.  
From this distance  
I can know your solitude,  
Can sense your need of sympathy:  
Reclining here,  
I understand the deep affinity  
Of you and me.

SANCTUARY  
Winsome Latter

I have watched and wondered  
Why this street should swerve,  
And suddenly  
Escape the thronging highway through the town  
To rest beside my window here,  
And seem to have no purpose  
Save of beauty in retreat.

And yet, why should any purpose lie  
Amid the broken stones?  
Wondering I sit, while the distant traffic sings;  
And then the wheeling pigeons  
Answer my perplexity  
With the fluttering down of tired wings.

VIVIDLY TO HOLD  
Winsome Latter

Bloom of wattle distilled from the sun,  
Threading the gully's shade...  
Vividly to hold this lovely view  
Of brown and gold and green,  
That I might fold between  
The canvas of the heart and eye,  
This image, to endure  
Beyond the natural span of memory.

So will eternity be draped,  
Though it be desolate and grey,  
From the gallery of my earthly dream......  
When the world has claimed this flesh as dust.  
Light.

Light is the garment understanding wears,  
The substance wisdom owns and uses  
To reflect within the prism of the mind  
Forms of warm and lovely colouring.

Through light,  
The vision of the future  
Stands in silhouette  
Against the present grey horizon,  
Lucidly.

O argent light flood my soul,  
Flash forth from diamond starry ways,  
Speed down a myriad miles through ebon clouds  
(Enfolding with your mastery the gift of Truth)  
To rest within my heart...  
Until in prayer,  
Searching in the darkness of my soul,  
Faltering through doubt's confusing gloom,  
I find, beyond the shadow of myself...  
Your radiance!

SOME VERSES FOR TWO LOVERS  
F.H. Burns

If you should journey through a forest, when the winds  
Howl and snows beat down, or should your way  
Lie across savannahs of hyacinth and cornflower,  
The falling white will muffle the steps  
And the blue petals will cover the prints;  
But do not look behind!

Gipsies often talk nonsense, conjuring  
Out of crystal  
Dark and light,  
And perhaps a circle;  
But the voice from above decrees.  
So when you feel the magnet's pull  
Hasten and heed the voice; when skies moan  
With anger, change your steps towards the hill.  
Dispute not the ballots,  
Arguing the disposition of seats, the numbers  
Of tickets and forms:  
The worm in the belly and the nectar in the mouth  
Are also part of the journey.  
For you Heliodorus, have come far, though  
On the way you groaned and stretched. Desire  
And death fought in you,  
And on the next hill the vision of fair women.  
In the poet's mind you learned of one who also  
Wandered.  
Indecision and strife were yours, Depphinia,  
Ancient faiths and blood to taunt  
And try you:  
And the taunt of one who also was uncertain.  
But you were certain of one thing;  
That the gold was sinking onto the sand, and the rivers  
Were fast running out. Moons are far apart  
And with them the tides. While the rivers lie low  
On the sands, then take the gold. It has lain  
A log time  
Since the day you looked on the lilac, or, in  
The silence yearned to music, while blossoms, graces,  
Fell from above; since the day too looked on the sea,  
And walked heart by heart near the city. Tears  
And pearls, syrup and gall: what is joy  
But these? Yours may it be  
For my wishing.

NO RAMP OF ROME  
F.H. Burns

As I stood by the casement, over the court,  
Savouring the sun, and the still glory of the fountain  
I saw you mounting up the palace stairs -  
A figure dressed in silk and dove-grey pearls,  
Glistening like a larch on a morning in Spring.  
But between us was raised up a wall,  
Not like the golden towers of Constantine  
Nor ramp of Rome, nor China's endless bastion,  
But a barrier of hates and fears, of shyness and pride -  
Family against family and your god against Mine -  
My heart grew weary behind the velvet curtain  
And watched you gathering lilies  
And singing like a naiad of Wagner.

IN SEARCH OF PASSION  
E.H.Manchester

Pentecost to Calvary -  
Fragrant in fleeting memory,

Hid from desire in elusive phantasmagoria,  
Be within my entity unbounded,  
Slow moving forward, pausing to ascertain  
That which is contrary.

Runic adornment,  
Ordinal indices;  
Follow with loathing with love repudiate.  
Crown you the hypocrite, the fool you lapidate.

Give me the heriot - the heart of the heresiarch -  
the victor in chains  
Hail thou Ephesian!

No more in the morning the odour of sanfoin:

the Salii rule where the oxen have trod.  
Shem is triumphant in the land he abandoned

And no sistrum shakes shakes for Isis.

THE HYMN OF THE WHIRLIGIG  
June Hartnett

Around and around  
Within my skull,  
Without a sound  
To others near......  
A whirling panorama,  
A jig-saw thrown awry  
A stageless, noiseless drama,  
A tortured fantasy.

I hate! I hate! I hate!  
(Can't you hear my scream?  
My fate, my fate, my fate  
Has taught me this mad hymn).

A whirling twist  
Of fortune's wheel.  
Spun through the mist  
Of ageless space,  
Twisted my reluctant flesh  
And moulded with some anguished soul  
Wandering in that wilderness.  
A grinning deity above  
Placed it here to see it squirm,  
Joying in its torturings -  
A bloodless pin-transfixed worm;  
Placed it in the wrong land  
With all the things beset  
That it hated:  
Ignorance, coarseness, apathy,  
Intolerance, taunts, lack-sympathy.

As if this were not enough,  
It gave a glimpse of glorious things,  
Of life that hating soul desired,  
But grinning still, the fiend denied  
All those things eventually......  
But a knowledge that infinite striving  
Had no effect, no force for driving  
To all those things.

(Old Tantalus would have understood  
I'll see him there for ill, not good)  
I hate, I hate, I hate.

Around and round  
The whirligig,  
To those outside.  
Within my brain  
It screams and mocks.

(The waves are beating  
On the rocks,  
Remorseless, pitiless, harsh.)

A WINTER NIGHT-PIECE  
June Hartnett

The wind howls like a demoniac spirit,  
And dies to a wistful throat-caught moaning,  
Beneath the gusty rattle of the rain:  
Rising and falling,  
Falling and rising,  
In the chill ecstasy of winter;  
The ecstasy that has fallen  
On louring clouds and rain-blurred windows,  
And wrapped the world in a sobbing darkness:  
The chill grey breath of a darkened season.  
The wind's stormy hands shudder the world.

TREE  
June Hartnett

This green-browned Autumn found  
The hollowed furrows round her feet,  
New-stitched with lambent rows  
Of young wheat growing lustily.  
For joy in a fecund season  
Her straight trunk were a sheathing robe  
Of glowing violet and creamy gold.

But round that trunk she wore,  
Axe-bitten, a betrothal ring of death,  
And from the circlet oozed her golden-amber blood.

Her leaves  
Had lost their sweetness with the summer,  
And hung in dry despondency,  
Toys for the capricious wind.

They said her roots had swallowed  
Too much richness.  
She stood;  
Beauty fallen to utility.

And yet, perhaps, in a satin dawn of summer,  
Before the brightest light has flowed  
From the hills to the rustling ripeness  
Of the wheat, there shall I see  
Half-real in the half-light  
A mist-limbed effigy of Beauty,  
Silver-crowned above the nonchalant grain.

BLUE NIGHT  
Bill Belson

Blue night  
Came down with a soft mantle,  
Down on skylights,  
Down on green ground.  
She came down like a whisper,  
Down like a quiet bird:  
She came like a shadow.

The tired trees have shut their eyes,  
The laughter has gone out of the river.  
The old horses have stopped straining and sweating:  
They are at last at ease.  
And the birds that fly on and on in the heavens,  
Are too taking their ease.

Blue night  
Is welcome on the skylight:  
We are all waiting,  
And waiting,  
For our ease.

THE LITTLE FALSE FLAME  
Bill Belson

In our modern world, under he searching gaze of science and under the crush and grind of the forces of annihilation now set loose, many of our cherished beliefs have been called false and thrown out...... Perhaps a lot of them were false. But if our science and probing thought cannot give us something warm in their place - if they have only coldness and its heart-break to give us – then we must be pardoned if we are sad and even fearful, as one by one our comforting lights go out...... In the gathering storm, our culture is like a little flame in the huge and pressing darkness.

Cold is the wind,  
Dark is the sky,  
Weak is the flame,  
Furtive the eye.

Oh the tumult ringing me round,  
Oh the desolation,  
Oh the death that is come on the earth,  
Oh the darkness and the gloom.

Dry are the leaves,  
Dead is the ground,  
Small is the flame  
We are gathering round.

Oh the terror, the fear un-named,  
Oh the annihilation  
When the little false flame  
Goes out!

Moan wind, moan,  
Wail to the desolate sky.  
Grope, grope,  
In the cold, in the chill,  
Blunder in the darkness,  
Squirm in the earth,  
Blacken with the leaves.

Where shall we find another,  
When the little flame  
Goes out?

THE MOUNTAIN  
Bill Belson

The far mountain is alone:  
It has lifted its tall head to the clouds,  
And is above me.  
Yet sometimes I feel  
That I have taken wing,  
And flown far beyond it,  
And above its wailing crags  
And the crests of cloud at its summit.

BACK TO EARTH  
Bill Belson

I climbed once more in the tall tree that grows on the top of the hill. The boughs were cool on my hands, and soon the air began singing. "I am high above you, ground", I cried, "and I don't care for you at all". The little blades of grass fell away, and the earth was only green. Something moved below and I said: "You may creep on the ground, but I am king". The leaves began whispering and a soft wind blew in the boughs.

Down below I could see the small town in dismal greyness squatting in the hollow. "Down there", I said, " are the people with their cooking pots, locked in their dark houses with only windows for looking out. What do they know of the things of the field and the cruelty in the grass and the fall of blossoms and the tall limbs of trees? Nothing! And I alone am king and have climbed high where the birds are and have heard the singing breeze".

The earth was stretched beneath me. It went on and on. But somehow there was always a horizon and beyond it I could not see, peer though I did. "I shall climb a little higher then". But up there the boughs were thin and all asway and I grew giddy looking at them and took a harder grip where I was. "It is one thing to be a small king, but oh, so lonely to be king of all". But I began to feel lonely as it was and I climbed just a little lower in the tree.

Clouds came over the sun. The air grew cold. In the stillness I heard all earth's sound coming up to me with its conflict and its wailing. I heard the noise of battle in the grass and it filled the air and beat upon my ears. The earth was growing dark and a cold wind shivered in the leaves.

The lights came on in the houses in the hollow. And then I climbed down, saying: "On these winter evenings, it is so cold in the tree; I am a little thing coming back to the ground". The leaves were moaning high above me and now it seemed to be coldest of all things to be king in the tree.

I walked to the little town in the hollow here the windows were warm with light and the people were talking and making laughter. And then all the coldness went out of my heart, and I ran within, to my people.

THE UN-NAMED (After The Buddha)  
Bill Belson

I am weary of chanted ritual,  
Weary of whispered tales,  
Weary of singing psalms.  
And sick with longing,  
And sick without god.

I am not for ritual,  
Not for idolatry,  
But god,  
Not for temples  
But the rude air.

I quest the bodiless, the dreamless, being  
Known fleetingly and longingly in rare moments;  
I seek what is beyond words,  
Beyond understanding.  
I seek past the restless end of reason,  
Beyond the veil, beyond eternity.  
I seek peace,  
And an end to weariness and tears and yearning  
And the terror of friendlessness.

I seek past anger and its flames  
And the sickness coming after;  
The cockerel cries of men  
And the strutting and the ravings  
And the endless I.  
I go beyond the horror in the blades of grass:  
Teeming insect life shocked into cannibal death,  
Poisonous, slash-mawed, jaw-to-jaw;  
Beyond the terror over the full earth.

I am turned from the clamour  
And the show of glory  
And the sparkle and the splendour  
And the tumult of barking.

Come then, with me.  
Leave man's countless sorrows;  
Come out from city dives,  
Out from their gutters.  
Poor unschooled urchin,  
Hard-eyed in their maze and babble of hopelessness –  
Come out, poor child.  
Come out from the drab tenements,  
Out from the chores,  
Out from the agony of tears,  
Out from the meniality,  
Out from your sickness with each other.  
Come, then, sad children;  
Come, then, you bent people, dreary eyed.

Poor man, toiling up the painful ages,  
Mazed with shadows and sorrows and tears.  
Evolving – yea, but slow;  
Walking up the long ascendancy -  
Yea, but slow.  
Long, long, is the way we mortals go,  
Weeping and smiling and heaving sighs  
And puzzled and longing.

The pressure within will be out!  
Heed it!  
Let it out!  
Come forth from the gloom of the hovel;  
Turn, turn!  
The east is flushed with flame  
And the sun will be risen.

The ego of shreds and tatters of perception,  
Flung together in the whirl of living,  
Is at death no more.  
This I the bombastic is no more;  
This I the hungry,  
This I the lonely,  
This I the strong,  
This silent I -  
This flesh-loving, this sensuous,  
This forgetful I -  
This ferocious, this boastful, this conceited,  
This proud, this merry I -  
This I the impetuous, the wild, the free,  
This inglorious I,  
This trash,  
This bundle of flung tatters,  
Will pass with the I of dogs and swine.  
This I, this ego of tatters  
Is no more than tatters.  
What is flung will be unflung.

I partake of the universal nature of things;  
The oneness overall;  
The drop of rain gone quickly to a pool,  
The pool to stream,  
And the river accomplished in the sea;  
A million slow-founded mighty laws  
Wrapped in one great governing overall;  
The power of nations welded in one;  
The thoughts of eons and worlds recounted and purged  
And wonderfully come together;  
My wife and I as one;  
Our friends joined together;  
The sands merged in one;  
Speech all mixed in one,  
Song and laughter,  
Sorrow, joy,  
All intermingled,  
Interknown,  
And one.

And the wind puffs dust from the mountain MAW,  
Dust from the plain,  
Dust from the withered straws,  
Dust from my heart;  
Dust unflung,  
Dust from the eternally unsung glories,  
Unloosed, undone;  
Dust from the entities,  
Puffed by the wind  
And merged in one.  
A common end for birds and leaves,  
Plucked down from the heavens  
And in dust dismembered.  
A common end for kings and bees  
Plucked out of the swift days  
And in dust unremembered.

The universal quality  
Called 'creation',  
Called 'being',  
Called 'soul',  
Is merged in all things;  
It is horse and ant and tree and king,  
Vine and pillar and tattered string;  
A quality like water,  
Universal,  
And unloosed, joined together.

It will be balm to ease your wearying  
Restful balm;  
Quiet to quell your torment and your unbelief,  
Quiet to settle you.  
It is guidance to guide you,  
Light to sighten you,  
Strength to exalt you;  
It is singing in the heart at sunset,  
And singing in the coolness of dawn,

It is the sense of quitting clay  
And yet intensely,  
Impersonally,  
Being.

Quiet in the tree world,  
By the pool,  
Unmazed -  
Stirred within.  
The dreamy imagining of mind were through  
And my being,  
Merging with the spirit of the hanging leaves,  
Being with the quality of pools,  
Was uncontained,  
And huge,  
And there were no leaves and no pool  
And I was long forgotten.

I have sought in unknown places  
And in city leaves,  
And since I sought with earnestness,  
In earnestness have I been received;  
In crude stones  
And the utter sea,  
Received, received;  
In grass and gentleness received.

By the ripple flow tinkling with laughter,  
Huge within;  
Prone in the starry night,  
Sing-souled;  
Vagrant in the booming lone heavens,  
Terribly unflung,  
Awakening with tears and loneliness;  
Moving with the leaves, wind-blown.

Breathe the deep sea  
With moan and madness;  
Stand crag-high on unkempt stones,  
Wild in the gale,  
Scream-wind in my clothes;  
With beaten cheeks turn seaward,  
Sightless - gazed,  
Deep breathing on the beating gale.

In river glades  
Cicada-shrilly-sung,  
Warm in the beamy sun.

.........

From hovels and churches and weary lives  
Came dirt and trash and graves;  
From the garrulous crowd,  
Garrulity;  
From conviction,  
Sham.

But I have sought in far unknown places  
And in city leaves,  
And in my earnestness I have been received.  
In books and running tides,  
And bright bright children, wonder-eyed;  
And windy upper limbs of trees,  
And kindly smiles,  
Received.

Ah, come now, look with me;  
Come out of city dives  
And villainy and hate and lies and tears;  
Away from the throaty psalms and the poor fear of ending.  
Come out, poor child,  
Come out from the drab tenements,  
Out from the greyness and the unshed tears.  
Come, women, from the meniality,  
Out from the dust and the disease,  
Out from your sickness with each other.  
Come then, the aged, death-bound, weary-eyed.

Come, turn with me,  
Turn, turn about;  
The road is unending,  
The vision is high;  
The east is flushed with flame,  
And in an un-named glory will the sun be risen.

THE FLING OF THE THING  
Bill Belson

In the swing,  
In the fling,  
In the bosom throw,  
In the grasp of eternity  
Tomorrow;  
Racked through the rotten roof  
With a glimmer star  
And a hope in a dying heart  
And a chord  
And a chord  
Repeating in the night,  
In the deafness of today and tomorrow.

Walk the boards of the earth  
Crying: "Glory road!"  
Crying gay stuff.  
In the croon of the thing  
And the swing and the swirl of the thing,  
With a fling of a wing  
In the heaven sky,  
Grasping at the moon  
Went I

YET I WRITE IT DOWN  
Bill Belson

I lifted my eyes to the heaven-sky,  
Exulting.  
In these rare moments there are no words,  
But I write them.  
Why,  
In the whisp of today,  
I should not just exult,  
I cannot tell you.  
Unlike the birds gone athwart in the air  
And seen no more,  
I must must not exult alone,  
But set it down.

The ages are full of paper  
And words:  
Reading them does not lead to exulting;  
Writing them does not preserve me -  
It does not enshrine them or me.

And yet I lift my eyes to the free air  
And then, in a moment,  
Write it down.

IN THE HASTY TASTY  
Bill Belson

Sitting there, I watched an old fellow,  
A white-haired going-bald old chap,  
Wiping his forehead.  
And saw by him some derelicts equally gone  
In this tawdry place.

And I wondered if perhaps out of the heart-yearning,  
Out of the wander of my time,  
I too should find my way here,  
Wiping my forehead,  
Going bald.

I wondered if out of my restless heart  
And soul-searching  
I should as surely blast away the warm moss  
And the fireside of sweet illusions  
As I thought perhaps  
That this fellow had done.

Against the surge in me,  
The cry for eternity and youth in me,  
This old fears grows,  
Beating its cold hands  
On my frozen walls.  
Crying: "I am desolation  
Come to scale you -  
Come to blast into you.  
I am the wind to scatter you".

Against the oath of a million tomorrows  
I hear the Wurlitzer  
Turning in a spin without meaning,  
And wearing down -  
With all its silly jargoning,  
Wearing down...

And the old fellow goes out,  
Wiping his thinning white hairs.

BUCOLIC  
B. O'Sullivan

The shadows are long on the stubble fields;  
The white clouds sail in an escalator line and  
And never deviate from the course;  
Their shadows move quickly over the paddocks  
And up the roads; they darken the fretwork of the gums.  
The clouds sail awry, mount  
In cumulus above the hills, and disappear.

These do not fall like leaves, wraiths in the sun,  
But come as the shadows of tanks  
Advancing in the desert, and though the squadron persevere  
In the straight course the formation, the shadows  
Are inclined to flux, watchful, baleful, in momentary respite  
To the quiet sands. There is no relief, but a breeze trickles  
Up the gully, evaporates on the plain. A wind may  
Shuffle about the house, but we watch  
The black shadows on the bleak land, look  
For the smoke that will rise in the afternoon.  
Red cloud at sunset, and in the morning  
Dark, when only sunbeams sing  
And the burnt earth is silent, trees droop or rustle.  
For there is no song here, where the sheep never  
Shift from the shifting shade of the leaves,  
Wait all day for the lorry at the paddock gate,  
At night turn to the headlamps  
That hum and toss and flicker in the low hills.  
For we have not too much, the vanes of the windpump  
Are stopped, brown water is gone. The sun  
Burns the earth and lightens the clouds.  
They rise  
High on the wind, over the hills.  
We see them depart.

INVOCATION  
B. O'Sullivan

Grant me the promise of a future time  
And do not grow old;  
Though waters and the flying clouds grew old,  
Be thou as May.  
Look always on my never resting climb  
And light my way.

Be thou my everlasting sun  
And guard my life;  
Though all the perilous earth should 'tempt my life,  
Deflect thou the aim.  
Heed not all the ways that have to run,  
But be the same.

Hours of love we have left behind,  
And sweet days of peace;  
Though trouble and lone days attack that peace,  
Grieve no the heart.  
Keep always our last whispers in thy mind.

WHITE FOAM  
B. O'Sullivan

Take your feet along the sand  
And let the white foam  
Bathe them.  
Loosen your bright locks for the sharp wind  
To flay them.  
Stretch out your gracious hand,  
And forget that home;  
Farewell them.  
Turn your head away, forget you erred  
To leave them.  
Take your sandals from the rocks  
And leave the grey sea  
Behind you.

REFLECTIONS ON A WINDOW PANE  
T.W. Horne

Subjective, introspective, I sat  
Immersed in the mists of mind's own making,  
That bound me, drugged my limbs,  
As if with lethe-water drunk,  
Mind anaesthetic to grosser forms,  
Plunged and dove on wings of thought.  
The grey lead sky in sympathetic mood,  
Writhed and moaned and sent  
Earthward streaky drops,  
Harbingers of the threatened storm.  
And as I watched with searching eyes,  
Striving past the grimy panes,  
A storm tear nestling on the wall  
Trembling, lonely in the gloom,  
Its glassy journey to the ground began.  
Poor dead thing  
Making its tortuous path  
Across the dirt and cobwebs.  
A sense of oneness - of sympathy with matter  
Drew me unreluctant to it;  
Myself projected in siliceous dimensions,  
Insubstantially aqueous  
Each moment losing stature  
Becoming impure, until at last  
All energy expended, it mixed with clay,  
Homogenous, unrecognizable and ineffectual.  
Is this then all? Have I lived vainly,  
Striven, fought, loved,  
Merely to evaporate?  
But no! For from the slimy grave,  
Insignificant, not mourned,  
Shall spring new life, nurtured by death,  
Unspoilt by living.

WALKING  
T.W. Horne

Pause quickly, the cold air hurting:  
See the land folded into a frown: threatening masses  
Bearded with the grubby summer snow  
That looks child-handled;  
Small receding remnants of patchy brown.  
Here winter retires  
And with impotent showers  
Inspires  
Clusters of flowers  
Like cheap dress material.  
And scribbled in the clumps amongst the boulders  
The fingers of snow gums  
Point to the crown of the summit,  
Haloed by clouds in granite ethereal.  
See the black crows gather  
To pick carcasses white,  
Hovering together  
Like flies on manure.  
Look at the hawk hanging,  
Suspended in flight  
Eyeing its prey.  
See the grasshopper imitate water-fall spray  
On elastic elbows.  
And the lizard twisting out of sight.  
Flirting with clouds, the sun chuckles on water  
And freckles the lichen;  
Sets on the cows slouching home for the night,  
Swinging full udders.  
Stand alone in this mountain stillness  
And bathe in the light  
Of a vague adolescent moon  
Dimming emotional fire.  
Laughter shrieks on the wind to the stars,  
Fear dissolves into dreams,  
Numb flesh dulls the cramp of desire,  
Tears melt into the streams  
And rattle away.

TIME FRAGMENT  
T.W. Horne

Broad laughing day  
And subtle sequined night  
Can only in the dawn and evening unite.

Day sees wheeling, sun-shot spades and steel;  
Through nuts and bolts the day can feel  
The staccato engines hum of might.

Life and rhythm...  
Till day and darkness unite.

Moon illumines silent men and tools  
And the steaming sweat of labour cools.  
The weapons of work gleam in her light.

Still and sleeping  
Till darkness and day unite.

THE CONCERT  
T.W. Horne

Conductor stands  
Eternity within his hands.

Dim, delicate notes hover as bees,  
Then crowd together.  
In swelling chorus render  
Vibrant thrilling thunder.

Echoes and re-echoes  
Through the chasm of the mind  
Awakening...  
Creation itself is wrought  
In the infinity of thought.

One remembers  
The brilliant bursting birth of spring,  
Exuberant in colour,  
Extravagant in laughter.  
In its maturity,  
Love's exquisite ecstacy.  
And solemn shoveling of earth on earth  
To cover death.

Baton beats at temple  
Perpetually,  
Rhythm mirrored in pulsation  
Constantly.

Baton in animation  
Stirs sublime fascination  
Then falls...  
Pinnacled we burst in acclamation.

GIRL SAYING HER PRAYERS  
T.W. Horne

With cigarette butts glows the copper urn.  
Jagged food tins eye the moon  
Along the lazy gutter slime,  
Glinting white.  
Winking signs depict  
Full-bellied theatres sucking up their crowds  
Half dazed out of the night.  
A girl unbinds and sets her hair,  
Mechanically thinking her evening prayer -  
Her mouth is full of pins.

THE MOURNER  
Gwen West

This is my hour.  
His has past, swift and sharp  
Like a rapier thrust.  
But I still feel the wound,  
And around my heart swift sharp stabs of pain.  
O can it be his sacrifice was vain?

What stirs the blood - Revenge?  
Not sweet.  
What bitter agony besets the mind!  
There are other traps to snare the feet  
Of the unwary and the blind;  
And other heights to climb.

And now the minutes pass.  
Yet though I tremble, wither slowly,  
I too must reach my goal -  
This is my hour.

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD  
Gwen West

When I go,  
There will be new people  
In this dear world -  
This world that I have loved.  
New people, brave people;  
New ways; new wisdom;  
New lamps for old.  
But I wonder  
In the years to come,  
When Reality has ousted Trust -  
If still they'll have the magic touch  
To turn all rubble into golden dust  
That lay around my feet.

THE LILY POOL  
Gwen West

I know a pool where lilies grow,  
Where evening breezes softly blow,  
And dusk there shrouds with mystic light  
The water elves who play at night.  
A dryad once there stooped to gaze  
And caught the moon's reflected rays,  
And swiftly turning ere she fled,  
With shimmering lights upon her head,  
She shed her beauty all around.  
......  
Now lilies floating there are found.

CROSS-LIGHTS  
Gwen West

Cross-lights trouble the earnest soul,  
Bedim the sight;  
Ambition daunted, stayed, bewildered  
By their light,  
And trembling thoughts half-formed  
Take flight.  
When storms arise, a bird in flight  
Overtaken,  
Upward soars its way into the night  
Unguided;  
Light flashes -- it falls, sight  
Dazzled.

REUNITED  
Gwen West

The flower,  
Gathering light and dew within its glowing heart,  
Intermingles  
With its own life's essence, a glowing part.

The seed  
Is born and folded round as in a shroud;  
The faded petals  
Fall into dust, yet thus it will not perish,  
For soon again  
Twill be reborn, - a lovely thing to cherish.

Can it be our life  
Must sometimes pass alone, or in a cymbal loud,  
And reunited,  
A glad spirit comes to life?

HIS LITTLE WORLD  
Gwen West

He loves the little things he sees around:  
Soft moving grass above the ground;  
Fluffy yellow chicks, the little pup,  
A bird in cage as he looks up.  
But now and then his hands extend  
On something larger to depend;  
In his own way, he makes appeal  
To understand this world is real.  
The fantasy of something wise  
Lies in the depths of baby eyes.

THROUGH OTHER EYES  
Gwen West

You have taken me  
Where scarce my feet could tread,  
Without your helping hand.  
To where a garden grew at its own will,  
Flowering forth, and over-flowing down the hill  
To reach a creek,  
Which ever winding in and out,  
Sang on its way, and put to rout  
The road that I would seek.

With man-made wings,  
You pilot me through space  
To reach some height unknown;  
And looking down, through other eyes I see  
The rivers flash like ribbons to the sea -  
Quick vibrant destiny.  
The cities lie lace-patterned so,  
A distance lends a fainter glow,  
As onwards still we go.

As in a dream  
The clouds go softly by;  
Through other eyes, I see a star.  
So must a diver in his ocean bed:  
Intent on what must lie ahead,  
He moves apace;

Quick moving shapes will pass him by  
And dazzling beauty catch his eye  
With sparkling grace.

You have taken me  
To where my soul beats safe retreat,  
And so I understand:  
Whenever the sun and moon and stars shine forth,  
And Springtime too is breaking through the north,  
I shall be led  
Through countless ways. Through other eyes I'll see  
My hand in yours: you will be taking me  
To where scarce my feet could tread.

MEMORY  
Gwen West

He views his life in a misty way,  
As if from dream-land he never rises to greet the day.  
He hesitates - his judgment is not keen:  
He waits for you to come between.  
Yet often in his tired eyes,  
I catch a glimpse of sweet surprise;  
A sudden understanding swift and keen,  
That covers all the years that lie between.

POSTERITY  
Bill Moriarty.

As slow as cheerless twilight falls,  
I gaze in vague uneasy fear  
On mighty summer's ruined glory;  
The failing light might mourn the year.  
And soon a low wind begins to moan  
Amongst the leafless trees, and cold  
The growing eddies fan my cheek,  
Chilling me, I see the years unfold.  
Stark 'neath the wintry moon I see  
A wilderness of shattered trees,  
Of broken spruce and naked pine,  
That stretches, lifeless, to the seas.  
And tearing out of the icy north,  
The wind assaults the frozen soil  
And howls through broken limbs a dirge  
To a thousand years of endless toil.  
Above, the steely sky and grey,  
And ragged clouds in terror flying;  
While the pallid moon looks down, timeless -  
A dead world above a dying.
The Pauline Group, 31 March, 1950

SHADOW DANCE  
Roger Challis Brown

Swift-tumbling fingers prance  
Among the keys...  
The fleeting shadows dance,  
Swift-tumbling. Fingers prance  
To bid them boldly chance  
Hard light's decrees.  
Swift, tumbling fingers. Prance  
Among the keys......

BARRALLIER  
Roger Challis Brown

Sydney, New South Wales:  
December, 1802.

My Lord,  
Respecting your Lordship's remarks on this matter, I must advise......  
He must advise; could the dry sound  
of quill on parchment, the sterile, timeworn phrases,  
ten thousand miles of sea to bring  
his meaning home to Hobart? Or was he bound  
by his commission to a scheme  
which threatened failure for his careful plans,  
and, worse than that, might bring contempt  
upon him? For mutiny, which seemed  
mere idle word, would smoulder,  
flare, and, if he knew the temper of his men,  
would surely through him down;  
Hobart would burn his fingers then!  
Months would pass  
before he'd know the answer  
and of long months  
each day would bring a new complexity;  
the problem was no insect, to be pinned for study.  
Instead, the distance had him blindfold,  
orders bound him, his decrees  
were circumscribed by tight clauses  
of commission. What he'd give  
to let this rum-soaked jail  
slide to perdition! He could live  
in England... but enough of dreams,  
for Hobart must be answered.

... in the measures I have adopted I shall persevere, knowing it to be the only means of rescuing this colony from such a state...

And such a state it had been; none  
could deny he'd weaned the infant  
of a thirst for rum  
which might have choked it,  
for it seemed  
that all the nations of the earth  
had merged to flood his charge with spirits.  
What he'd done  
to drive the rum-ships from his wharves  
he'd done alone, for this corruption  
lay so deep that all the Corps  
would be defiant if they could but fool  
him to concessions to his constant rule.  
Thanks be  
that Phillip had not seen his work  
marred by a trio of incompetents;  
Grose and Paterson, whose lax rule  
had filled officers' pockets......  
and Hunter,  
who had failed to act when action  
had been needed. His own work  
could only check the rot.

Meanwhile, Flinders had mapped the coast  
and swept away the doubts  
which fogged the Chart's precision,  
so that as Governor he might claim  
to rule a mighty continent! Hollow boast,  
since all his powers clung  
to a miserable strip of coastline;  
from Sydney  
he could see blue haze of mountains  
flinging bold challenge to the adventurous,  
a barrier which, it seemed, they'd never break,  
for Hacking had turned back, daunted  
by endless miles of lonely cliffs massed  
to repel him;  
Boas, for all his iron grapnels, ropes, and gear,  
had been no luckier.  
Now Barrallier had tried, sent  
On embassy to the King of the Mountains...

... having taken ensign Barrallier as my aid-du-camp he was set out on a second journey to the mountains...

... his journal written in such an unintelligible hand, I have not been able to get it translated or copied...

Little use to the King! He knew  
Such cramped, ill-written French was task  
for scholar, and so sent it Home...  
... but let the journal speak:

Many had turned back  
when food ran short, but Barrallier  
made base at Nattai, fifty jolting miles  
from Sydney; there his party could not lack  
for food. Convicts and soldiers  
followed as he struggled west -  
strange retinue for envoy to a king  
who'd scorned all missions to his realm,  
and mocked them with grim jest  
of winding valleys wandering to cliffs  
hung in the mists so high that  
none could hope to scale them.  
Long days of battle with the tangled scrub  
left miles of mountain trail behind; they  
climbed the range whose spurs  
had awed them, stood there, mute  
in wonder of the plain that held their gaze;  
miles of good pasture shimmering in the haze!

They clutched at triumph then, and lost,  
for morning showed another range  
to bar their way, a stubborn azure line  
which tossed the mist from sun-kissed peaks  
to smash their early hopes.  
And so they set their pride on that horizon,  
crossed the valley, where  
the soldiers sweated in their red felt coats  
and cursed the foreign summer  
and their heavy pack.  
"The heat unbearable" he wrote.  
Again they reached the ranges,  
and a hundred tumbling creeks  
denied them passage; their way  
was blocked at last by sunless walks of rock  
which towered above them so that clouds  
and spray from a great waterfall seemed one,  
and no way round. Such a defeat  
as Caley was to meet in eighteen-five; nothing  
but to make the long retreat to Nattai...

but the result of his journey is that this formidable barrier is impassible.  
The facile words might haunt him  
with vague spectral doubt, but a solid fact  
was stark to show their worth. He'd proof enough  
from Barrallier's three journeys; drear records  
of long hardship offered for a tart rebuff,  
and some poor minerals which they'd pack  
and ship to England. Worthless stuff.  
Then (Devil take them) let these mountains  
lock their secrets in a rocky keep  
and let them rot there, for he'd send  
no further missions to a court  
which mocked his pride  
and set his powers at nought.

Now that the weary drought had passed,  
a heavy harvest promised ease  
for all; which matter he must now record.  
So let the coming year bring what it please.

I am happy to inform your lordship of the general good conduct of those under my charge.  
I have the honour to remain,  
Sir,  
Your most obedient humble servant,  
Philip Gidley King.

AND SHALL WE WAKE?  
Gerard Hamilton

I sigh! Naïve acknowledgement to infinite beauty,  
That gives my heart the throb for coming day;  
That lifts a light o'er this slumbering city;  
That kisses this harbour and pales the star-dust away.

You, the dawn, the reverent spendour of the east,  
The delicate glory of a master hand,  
Were sent to tint this kingdom with colour;  
To wake a day, to animate man...

That he might lift his head to heaven,  
Inspired to carry on, be brave,  
Forget the troubles of yesterday,  
Realize himself as both king and slave.

His destiny, his Utopia, is for his own cultivating.  
You, beauteous dawn, merely break to urge him on.  
But alas! This marveling mortal sleeps,  
Ignoring you with worse than scorn.

O wake you young and wholesome nation!  
Wake with the mind as with the eye!  
Rise and wash your society with culture!  
Learn and translate the beauty of your sky!

Feel the warmth of your own country's breath!  
Show your wealth in art and not in gold!  
Make for yourself a new and personal culture!  
Not sleep with semi-satisfied dreams of the old!

Make familiar your hand with pen and brush!  
Let flow from your soul what you really are!  
Blend, if you must, your music with industrial rush.  
But blend it do!  
For a nation without its music is a sky without a star.

Ah, the sky! Now see the array of sun's fiery crown.  
With solemn grace the mighty king ascends his throne,  
And in the lofty precincts of his eastern court,  
He sits to listen,  
Whilst is being read the coming day's proem.

Listen! For of what will that proem be?  
Gosh! I think I hear a distant voice,  
Say Austral Art shall rise!  
But ah! 'tis so faint and wistful,  
I fear the message will be lost  
Whilst ears are one with sleeping eyes.

THE END WAS SO SIMPLE  
Gerard Hamilton

Do you know what it is like to be suddenly in heaven - to have found the thing you've always wanted? Well, I do. I'm in heaven right now.

To tell you how I got there, I must go back a few hours - to just before the end came. The clock on the mantelpiece in the living room, which I also use as a study, was lazily chiming five a.m. Each distinct chime seemed to break the intense silence a little more.

"What's the use"? I muttered to myself, steeped in bitter despair and defeat, "What's the blasted use of trying to put an end to it...!"

Here it was dawn. I had been writing feverishly all night - tearing up what I had written and starting again, drinking pots of black coffee and smoking loads of cigarettes - and still I couldn't devise a deceptive end for a short story!

Realizing the grim truth of my inability to write, I flung the stumpy pencil down on my desk, littered with an author's rubbish and paraphernalia, and bumpered a cigarette with such savage determination that I felt I must do something desperate, something outstanding desperate and original, and do it immediately, to capture the particular sense, or rather nonsense, I wanted in the climax of my plot - a climax that leaves the reader in the air, yet able to smile at the amusing nothingness of it all. Such an outcome is the art of successful writing.

But, ah, I might as well have wished for the moon!

You see, for me to conceive such a climax was utterly impossible. Yet if I didn't conceive it, and write it satisfactorily, and have the story accepted by some publisher, how was I to pay the rent for a flat at Bondi, not to mention an oversize bill for electric light that burnt all night and every night, and the bins of coffee one consumed and cigarettes - my writing fuel - that can only be obtained in sufficient quantity on the black market.

Yes, I just had to do the impossible! I just had to work out an unexpected end for my plot! The bills just had to be paid! If they weren't......

I hastily lit another cigarette to blow a smoke screen around a horrifying vision of a debtors court.

The two hundred pounds I had twelve months ago, when setting out to learn the evasive art of short story writing, had irretrievably dwindled and success hadn't come to me. In short, I was broke, flat. Still, I was confident that once I had a plot with a surprising climax accepted by a publisher, other plots and surprising climaxes would unfold and would come from my brain as a woman produces odds and ends from her handbag.

I reflected a Moment. Perhaps if I started another story, a different theme, an ingenious climax might work itself out, miraculously. But then, what was the use of doing that! I didn't believe in miracles, and during the night I had attempted four different themes, and found a suitable end for none.

God, if I could only think one up - a humorous one, something meaningless and silly, but not too silly.

Think! Think hard!

No! no damn it! I give up! Another cigarette was violently bumpered.

A writer's hell is when he is too tired to think. And believe me, I was tired. But no matter how tired I am, I just can't relax until just something like an appropriate end has clarified for the plot I have set my heart on - for the plot I live. The pulsating life of the world at large becomes quite unimportant, non-existing; I run on a weird and wonderful kind of nervous energy that tingles through every part of my being as though I was connected to a ell charged battery. Sometimes I thought it'd be much easier and certainly more lucrative if I had gone in for opal mining.

I switched off the light in front of me on the desk, rose impatiently and walked to the windows that overlooked the jagged cliffs and the wide space of the Pacific Ocean. The delicate colouring that preceded the rising sun glowed in the eastern sky, waning the few remaining stars to faint winkles.

What splendour I thought; what majestic art and how inspiring it was. But I still couldn't make use of the inspiration. I still couldn't write. I still couldn't concoct a climax for a short story. I was a flop in the literary world a hopeless failure . .

My gaze riveted on the towering cliffs. There was the end, the end to everything!

God, no! Not that way. Poison if you like, but not smashing yourself down on those water-lashed rocks, splashing yourself all over them, disemboweled, like a Christmas pudding dropped on the floor. Think of the ugly mess!

I shuddered. I abhorred ugliness.

Poison! That was the only way out!

I hurried to the bathroom, opened the wall closet and extracted a bottle of lysol which I usually used on cuts inflicted while shaving. It was empty. Then I suddenly remembered an embarrassing bill at the local store and sickened at the thought of asking for another bottle on credit.

I looked round in mounting panic. I had to make an end now, and end to worry, writing and everything! My razor, a cut-throat! No, no! Nothing so gruesome . . . . . Well, what about the bath-tub! Yes, that'd be perfect! Fill it with water and drown myself.

I turned the taps on quickly - both hot and cold \- and started undressing, almost tearing off my clothes with a strange surging excitement. There'd be no unsightliness about this! And that's what I wanted _ a clean finish - a definite end for myself, even though I couldn't get an unexpected one for my short story about a man who worked hard in a factory all night.

I stretched into the tub, stretched out, and then smiled, suddenly relaxed.

Ah, what a perfect end to a night of hard work! A hot bath in the morning.

MORALISTS  
Neville Kirkby

You are bent with a load of Too Much,  
Oh debauchees of knowledge:  
For, not having the freedom of will or of thought  
To thrill at the feel of primal emotion  
Or breathe with delight the air of Ruben's aesthetics,  
You learn to walk on the balls of your feet  
And in slippered silence  
Listen with ears a-cock at keyholes,  
Hoping, within yourselves to catch at something,  
Pummel and twist and mould it  
To a pleasing ugly shape,  
Point out its faults in public;  
Give it to the crowd for image breaking...

For you, oh Moralists, there is one cure;  
To go a-pranking with Boccaccio,  
Or drink strong wine with Rabelais.

A ONENESS  
Neville Kirkby

The sound of a string and bow  
Comes  
Dancing and weaving on waves of air,  
A soft brightness in the dark,  
Warmth in the cold.

The thin high voice,  
Wavering, ecstatic,  
Guided by hands that love,  
That know, sings of a Oneness...

Artist and violin mated,  
Play to infinitude.

NOAH  
Lionel Pearce

Clouds came hungry for disburdenment  
Like shady souls rushing to Lethe's shore.  
Rain fell like grateful tears of overmuch despair,  
Upon the spongy and insatiable earth.

The river like a parting through the city ran  
And with its ebb in man had raised the scientific life:  
So they smiled upon its turbid drops  
Wherein the bed fumes curled  
'Like grains of gold' they said;  
And called its sluggish, folded, sleepy, surface gown  
'Beautiful'; and the town, on Sunday  
Went to bathe within its shallowness  
And both together were admired.

Noah, many times, walked on the pavement  
By the deep empty drains  
The road being washed by men who work on Sunday,  
Frowning at the gift-day to these denied.  
Watching the silver rivulet carry the dirt away  
He was possessed repeatedly by spirits  
And involuntarily looked at the empty sky.  
Their wings were not given strength enough yet  
To carry his will away.  
At the grating across the drain  
The rubbish of the people held the water at bay.  
He noticed this, losing sense of the men working and the cloudlessness.

Bank upon bank the clouds move, like pews piled together;  
Rank upon rank the rain falls like wheat at the binder;  
The lead string grows longer and the lead will abide.  
Oh yes, I am muddy, laughs the river,  
But here is the mud of my mountains!  
The breeze is no longer enough;  
But her own innate longing for carving  
Has wrenched into a thousand folds  
The springiest mail of storm's forging.

The men have their gift re-received.  
And Noah, alone in the street,  
Wades through the water re-rising.  
The wings of the spirit have grown  
And his bulk not o'erweighing  
Carry him easily on  
To God-like reverberant doing.

II.

Oh youthful legged girl  
How your thoughts whirl  
Above these stacks of stone  
In the evening air!

The sudden smiles  
That waves carry up to your face  
And then their disappearing  
And the thoughtful space!

Is not the whole of the sky  
Bending in your heart!  
Are you not dancing high  
Like the maddened lark!

III.

When our love had just been born  
We bought a white chrysanthemum.  
It laughed at death as we with love  
By breaking into second bloom.

Then, one cold petal turned to brown.  
We changed with smiles the fallen water.  
I pretended that your frown  
Wanted more kisses brought her.

As the first brown petal died,  
Mourning seemed the rests obsession.  
Lying by your once warm side,  
I felt a coldness take possession.

Now each is dead, the bloom and love;  
The dust of each contains a power,  
As you may find if with your glove  
You crush the dead petals of a flower.

THE WRECKAGE OF HOPE  
Norreys de Vere

I live in long long nights of gloom  
At the bottom of a dark dark sea...  
(Alive within my prison room  
A dreadful fear is mocking me)...  
Black waves spread over me and spread  
Their fearful dread from side to side...  
I live out of touch with all reality  
Rocking fruitlessly in the gloomy tide.

There is no dawn, only the press  
Of darkness on my blind eyes...  
Only the kiss of hopeless loneliness  
On my lips as the day dies...  
I feel the glaum and suck of eternity  
At the bottom of my dark dark sea.

LET CREEP THE SAND  
Norreys de Vere

Let creep the sand, and the swift birds fly;  
Let creep the sand, and eons ebb and flow;  
Let deserts invade our valleys and our hills;  
Let these endure; let humans breed and die,  
For decay and death are all that life distills.  
When my friends depart, I must arise and go.

CHILDREN OF MERCY  
Norreys de Vere

Fear invades my tabernacled solitude;  
I hear a million voices through the darkness say;  
"Oh feed us, our bellies crave for food!  
Our lives are shattered in this vale of grief!  
The marrow of our bones is dried away!"

But I am blind and deaf with disbelief.

I awoke in fear adrift a crimson tide,  
Loud and grieving with tormented agony,  
Cries of those who screamed before they died,  
Flowing down to fill a vaster sea.

My ears invent syllables of blame,  
That I exploded shells and guns of grief,  
That I engendered death by blast and fire.

But I am deaf and blind with disbelief.

II.

All night long I hear the companies of hell  
Marching down the highways of my mind,  
Rising from a whisper to a vaster swell;  
The terrible trampling of a hopeless mankind.  
I see the millions lost and blindly journeying,  
Hopeless in their hearts as they march and sing:  
"Oh! Our multitudes are swelling,  
And our misery increasing!  
There is anger in our bodies dwelling,  
That throbs with beats unceasing!

"There is pity in our hearts for those  
Who bud and blossom like the rose,  
But wither darkly with the weed,  
Or prematurely turn to seed.

"Oh! Our children ask and cry  
That we bid these deserts fare-thee-well,  
And build our cities where a stream runs by.

"But they march with us in the ranks of hell!"

THE BLADES OF DOUBT  
Norreys de Vere

Why should the shadows creep,  
The twirling blades revolve,  
Why should doubt assail me?  
Why can't my conscience sleep,  
The problems of my mind dissolve,  
Must knowledge nought avail me?

This doubt worries and weakens me,  
Gnawing at the heart of my artistry!

THE LITTLE YEN OF HEAVEN  
Bill Belson

In the little yen of heaven,  
In the moon-wind flow,  
Plucking at the fleeting words in a crying aloneness.

It is possible to tell it once, and then no more.  
It is possible once  
And after that it is uncaught words  
And untold longings.  
In the small unstable infinity here,  
I look out of windows  
Like a child at the rain,  
And longingly wonder -  
Longingly strain.

One the corner crying,  
A hungry minded fellow crying alone -  
Crying: "Come to God".  
Crying so because he needs,  
Needs ground and a bastion  
And a baulk of rock to stand upon.  
In the gorgonzola of living well  
And murmuring all a-purr  
Of earth's substantial things  
And fruity cheese of today and tomorrow,  
They are telling it in fat drugged pain  
In the words they know -  
In the tittle-tattle of a gossip of tea,  
And a big stomach and a new car.

In the throb of a rhythm  
And the wheeze of a symphony,  
They tell it too,  
A-clasp and a-throw  
In the murmur of a pent up scream;  
A murmur and a whisper only,  
That must cry out,  
That must scream  
And be a-flow and away on a wooing wind  
And a-twine in the pulse of silence.  
Telling it so.  
But the yen of heaven evades us,  
And the moon-wind blows cold.
The Pauline Group, 11 May 1950

OLD MEN  
Lionel Pierce

How we have all been swept away  
By you kissing demons in the park.  
You raised to our throats the hankering  
Again, to press some spirit to our heart.

How slyly our blood moves now  
In our stiff and strengthless flesh  
Which once would have leapt like the plough  
When the horses are young and fresh.

APPLE PICKING  
Lionel Pierce

Parched by the summer's plenteous heat  
The earth lies sear.  
Below the trees furnished with fruit,  
The lumps are baked  
That in the spring the gardener's fork did turn.

Where men do walk  
Between the leafy branches  
Perhaps an apple plucking,  
The earth to dust is churned.

Autumn's milder path across the sky  
The sun takes now,  
In voyage from happy morn to wistful eve;  
Descending yet to winter.

Each orchard-nurturing hill is now attended to  
By men who would  
Deliver every blushing tree  
Of bounteous fruit.

The leaves are turning brown  
Beside the crimson brood,  
Which fills, each day, below the sinking sun,  
More of the woody leafy nest.

Apple on apple bumps -  
Claiming space to grow  
With the continuous streaming sap  
Drawn out of the dry earth below.

Passing the wide-flung gate  
Enters youth after youth with empty bag;  
With victory's spirit laughing,  
And glad of the work to be done.

Stepping slowly, the oldest horse  
Comes with remembering thoughts:  
The mild season he likes  
And the apples pleasantly near.

Nothing, the cart and the boxes  
To his long-trained muscles.  
And pleasant the standing  
While the boxes are filled by the pickers.

Each youth at the end of a row  
Begins the red river flowing  
Fast and faster into his bag  
In minutes a-brimming.

Greasy his fingers with the wax of their ripeness  
And light as he picks them they seem,  
And hollow they sound as they fall together  
In streams red and green from the branches unladen.

Pricks up her ears, the old mare, as she hears  
One on another, the boxes are filled  
By youths so noisome and nimble,  
With the riches of the earth so silent and still.

Soon she returns through the gate ever open  
More slowly than ever;  
Short is the track to the shed  
Where the packers are waiting.

The Farmer himself th' unloading begins,  
And tenderly turns the first box on the bench -  
The last that he lifts; for the rest of the picking  
He spends in appraising the fall.

He culls out a leaf and a branch,  
And grasps a delight here and there,  
And gauges the size with his fingers;  
The packers still talking, though keen to begin.

The cart-load is all overturned;  
And into the green-flecked crimson hill on the bench  
In inroads too swift for sight,  
The packers' fingers go.

Each globe enwrapped, and according to size  
Instinctively known, stuck in design accordingly varied,  
Layer by layer, boxes new made  
For the market are filled.

Laughingly vie with each other the packers  
To fill the first case:  
And grudgingly, victory goes to him  
Whom they know, best at the envied slyness of hand.

The shed has a corner  
Where two lift twin hammers all day:  
Nailing the walls of the cases together -  
Not too fast for the crops rich incoming!

THE CATS - FROM CAFÉ CHARACTERS  
Bill Belson.

Seeing us here  
Snapping at our chopped-up meat,  
Poking it into our narrow mouths -  
Seeing us here with cheap finery  
And hungry darting eyes -  
You will understand  
That we were not born into good fortune -  
That we didn't fall on our feet -  
And must make the most of what we have.

ELEGY FOR A DEAD RHINO  
Roger F. Brown

It seems to me prepos  
terous that such a wise rhino  
serous should have succumbed to phos  
phorous put there to poison mice!

POEM  
Gunnar Iscoocson

When you are sad and restless,  
waiting in your bed  
for sleep to come,  
and feeling it coming,  
quiet  
and soft like petal of a rose,  
to give a lonely soul release,  
then dries again that jaded cheek,  
so wet of tears,  
and tired eyes  
are closed - for sleep.

TRAIN HOME  
Roger F. Brown

The map is cunning, helped by clock's deceit,  
to say I've seen its hundred miles of spindly gums  
flash by in these short hours;  
brazen conspiracy to weld the lonely hills  
to prim suburban streets, a patent sham  
that takes no count of long hours  
spent in drowsy summer's heat, held  
by slow, sure rhythm of its cloudless days;  
which with first false dawn of city lights  
will bind me to the old routine  
of patterned days and flaunted petty urgencies;  
will bring remembered clatter, wild flung  
buffets from the stiff sea breeze,  
and, with your kisses, bring me home again.

SPRING  
Winsome Latter

The air is filled with tiny scents of Spring  
And light is swinging down the clear blue sky,  
And beauty glistens on the slanting wing  
Of a dragon-fly.

The pool reflects the foam of Wattle-gold,  
The swift Rosella's flash of crimson sheen,  
And all the earth is warm; and love is told  
Where the heart and grass are green.

STORMY BAY  
Norris Devir

All-ruffle sea, temper-tossed, trapped  
By savage winds in a bay, and following waves like hounds;  
No order here, all is wild and willful as though control had snapped;  
The angry prisoner water gnashes at the cliff impounds;  
Seething bubbles burst in stippling brown and black,  
Brief freckles on the foam of green-deep folds;  
Driven ashore, the waves come bouncing back,  
Ragged lines uneven, that only the wind controls.

THE FLOATING EAGLE  
Norris Devir

The eagle floats and slopes adown the air,  
Motionless motion, effortless gliding there,  
Extended eagle-tips, fanned like a hand.  
The gliding quivers and dips, black wings wide-spanned,  
Slow screw-threading down, circles descending.  
A scragged wilderness above the trees, he walks  
On careless wings to the haven of floating hawks,  
Sloping up on strong bird-buoyancy, lifting  
The body up, spread-tai; rudder guiding the lazy shifting -  
Gliding endlessly from dawn to the day's dull ending.

A POEM  
Winsome Latter

We two, lovers of words,  
and their capacity to etch in sound,  
the spirit's understanding......

This night should be our own, expectant  
with poem on poem to tell our love;  
and yet, our speech seems fettered at its source.  
Turbulent void of restless longing  
this, groping for expression  
to articulate our love:  
sentences half formed  
trailing into gestures,  
powerlessly.

Is the tongue less servant than the heart  
than the discerning mind  
that frames reality in song?

Or have we  
from our obliging lips  
(entreating confidence from living flesh)  
found a new identity with poetry?

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 wings  
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,  
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 stories 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,  
Batons, 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.  
Tiredness 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 our 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 slips  
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 known  
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 fishing 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  
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.

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,  
Part bird and only half ship.  
The mast leans forward in strength,  
The sails stretch out to full length,  
The canvas billows strong  
Lifting the vessel along.  
Sea in the air, on the lips.  
Sea, and the time ruffled sands -  
Why need he think out there,  
Leaning, the wind in his hair?  
His heritage comes with the tide,  
Cool water, his house, his fair bride.

THE CAMILLIA TREE  
Pacita Moore

The old stone cottage blinked in the spotlight  
Of gold from the sun.  
Its walls stood square, but he grey shingle roof  
Dipped and curtsied around the chimney  
And the doorways gaped onto tenantless rooms.  
But the camellia trees,  
The two dead camellia trees  
Clawed the air with skeleton branches  
As I passed by.

KOREAN DAWN  
David A. Haig

Low in the west  
Venus smiles on the field of Mars.  
As the pale light of the glittering east  
Shines on a twisted bloated corpse,  
Pregnant with stench and putrid slime.  
A sentry peers across the upchurned fields,  
A lone flower stirs its closed bloom,  
A puff of smoke, then shrapnel rains.  
As the sun lifts his golden head  
And parallel beams of parted light  
Stab the cold blue hopeless dawn,  
A rifle cracks  
Sharp in the stillness of a dying night,  
Punctured guts his the gaseous muck of death.  
The sentry turns to the lonely flower,  
Thrills to the solo song of a distant bird.  
But peace has gone with the fading stars  
Leaving hate in his place once more.

LINES  
J.A. Miles

In the clouds an intermission  
Then King Moon's sneering face.  
"Who gave you permission  
To stroll about the place?"

The fawning stars began to chime  
"My liege we'll have his head.  
At one a.m. we know its time  
The kingdom was in bed."

CUPBOARD LOVE  
Roger Challis Brown

They showed us the house - "We're not sure",  
they said, "we like it, but the garden's fair.  
We don't want any heavy digging. Fibro. City water.  
A place to camp, you know. We may move later."

Rooms unexpected, floors whose levels  
found a step to reconcile their evils,  
paneled walls, with rosebuds. Curious shape,  
but not unpleasant. Set well up the slope.  
"The man we bought from built it, working  
at weekends," they said. "Bit lacking  
in conveniences, no copper. Upwards  
of two hundred, it'll need. Plenty of cupboards."

Cupboards! A hoarding termites nest of them,  
doors set in unexpected corners, every whim  
recessed on hinges, scorning any disposition  
save the lust for acquisition.

"They might be handy, just to keep  
small odds and ends," they said; "We'll sleep  
out here of course." Now, when we visit there,  
the odds are even ends are everywhere.

AT ERA  
Robin R. Pratt

\--- by courtesy of The Bulletin  
At Era when the sun goes down  
darkness comes sliding down from the hill,  
slipping down the cracks where the creek slips  
to the sea.  
Then the grazing grass grows a stranger green  
as darkness, which on the hillside had stumbled,  
twig-crackling, slips quietly now  
seeping like water through the grass  
and round by the sandhills  
to the sea.  
There are crows at Era and their cawing  
over the huddled hillside bushes  
suddenly hurts the ear.  
And darkness hides in the mangrove swamp,  
imprisoned by the winding pathways there.

Now draw the tentflaps tight, prepare for sleep,  
thinking of silence. Now you hear  
the wind's hush in the palm trees  
and the crows cry and the waves' thud falling,  
now you dream  
strange dreams, and wake bewildered when the dawn is near.

STREET SCENE  
Manfred MacKenzie

There is Euridice in the green rain  
Beneath the lamp, shattering  
Into chips, while the pain  
Of the drenched air is humped  
In its coat: the light guttering,  
Crystallized and jumped.  
There Euridici, the rain in your hair  
Glistening shrilly do you hear  
Orpheus in the café, paying his fare,  
Two pennies with his violin  
To Charon: cracking do you hear  
That sound tired and thin,  
Stretched out tight in the grimy light  
While the rain threads ravel out.  
This light has nerves tonight  
Its breath steams: steams in vain.  
What are we waiting for? Do we wait  
For this street to put on its green again.  
From Aircraft Journey

In the small distance are the words,  
The words and the speech and hands and eyes,  
And each of us alone communes  
Precisely with himself and not  
With any other: then, over the sea,  
Divides in to movement of light on dark,  
Putting his awkward elbow comes the sun,  
And, oh, aerially move the faces forward  
As with the ruin of beveled aluminium  
And seeking with the rhythm of valises,  
We dispel the bright, split air.
The Pauline Group, 25 June 1953

BRIDGE MOOD  
Susan Vacchini

Now we all break the brand around the day  
and move through a frayed edge of light.

We have past the hard definition of noon  
when the hour is solid,  
the minute precise,  
We have not yet reached the certainty of darkness  
when hot neons bark at us silently  
and junction lights are bowls of blue ice  
melting into the night.

We are transient now, as greyness,  
and like many birds , we crumble  
into the grey light.

POEM  
Keith Free

Thou red and crimson apparition,  
The fabric of my long perdition,  
Thou art caged within my heart  
Whence thou pluckest my soul apart;  
The mathematics of your limbs I find,  
Teach me science of far different kind  
To that which I formerly had wrought  
The mesh and body of my thought:  
For thou art a sense and seem to me  
The expression of a symmetry  
Not learnt in this your world or mine  
But chequered forth in remoter time,  
While this grace that woos thy form  
In a sorcerer's web my mind deforms;  
And thy voice and the lips red-rimmed  
Are the vehicle of modern sin,  
For a soul it doth speed away  
To a paradise of sub-earthern shades,  
Whence a saint could but confess  
The divinity of its wantonness.  
O love, thy eyes deeper myst'ries have  
Than demon's spell at a weird black-mass;  
And when this body that your love bears  
Is resolved into its elements;  
All its breath and blood are spent;  
And texture fretted to the air,  
Then will those atoms of flesh, now dust,  
For all eternity chorus my lust.

ALONE ON THE HEADLAND  
Judy Forsyth

Twin pools of light,  
Sunlight, on the sea.  
Ripples crested with light,  
Sunlight on the sea.

Two golden pebbles, flung  
From the nearby shore,  
Where the land rounds a tongue  
To lick a tender sore.  
Where the yellow rocks hump  
From the yellow sand,  
Where the leathered trees slump,  
Crushed between sky and land.

Here the sea crawls with the tide,  
Enfolding with hungry arms,  
Pushing the rooks aside,  
To embrace in the sandy calms.  
Here are more stones to cast  
From the shore, to the sea, in the sun.  
Stones with the strength to hold fast  
The thought that has just begun.

For where there was only intention  
Now is perspective contemplation.  
Now vibrant glows the sunshine.  
Now static lies the shore.  
Now encroaches the blue of the sea.

"THE ARGUMENT WAS SIMPLE"  
Roger Challis Brown

The argument was simple, only  
the calculations were in doubt, the picked bones  
tossed to experts caged in wires to quiet  
their logarithmic snarls; but finally  
their problem would appear plain to plain men  
who disliked something attempted spawning  
these glum forecasts of confusion.  
Movement, striving, chance seized And won;  
these were things all could reckon by  
without this waiting, paused on the edge  
of anger, for a sigh which none would dare  
to query and all might obey...  
Tell me, who had foretold the answer,  
seen the approaching end, the silence?

ANNUNCIATION  
Judith Rayner

The peach trees wait,  
Flinging their grey branches,  
Webbing the lusty earth;  
The twigs tremble in love,  
In the naked wood.  
They stand in pain, and ache  
For the blossom to burn  
The coldness, break the blueness,  
Shatter it like a mirror -  
For peace comes with birth.  
And the girl by the gate  
Held in her parenthood,  
Dark-haired, Madonna faced,  
Her fingers touched; interlaced,  
Like the branches on the trees,  
Waits – her eyes lifted to the promise,  
The blue promise of the hills -  
As if her angel will come  
With blossom, and turn  
Her heart from memories  
Of endless furrows and centuries of soil.

DIDO FOR AENEAS  
Manfred MacKenzie

Now my leaf burns as deep glass,  
In its late pyre, now, now. I am only  
Smoulder, my anger spoken through you.  
But the dark wind hurts my mind, blows  
Me the children leaves from us, we ringed  
In the light. And our house of summer  
Was shimmered blade of tree, risen  
Palace-leaved while our spring roots  
Were flared strongly in the first ground.  
Why, how our house it was, the sheaved  
Granaries and white woodbird's dabble  
At pebble grounds around our feet.  
But my house was on ramped beach,  
By your ever-sea, and I think, mined  
Gently down with time motion, you hard  
Away-wind.  
A morning, ah, an early sea  
Your ships move pink-gilled into dawn.  
From my towered and sea wide eyes  
I had seen you; their report, dull news.  
Now I cannot think you ever loved me,  
My eyes nor hands, you had not feasted  
For any small thing.

THE BIRDS OF GOD  
From Euripides' _Hippolytus_  
Translated by Colin Black

Would that from this earth I might depart,  
And hide me in the cavers of the night;  
That God might place me in his winged flocks  
To dwell e'ermore. Then should I turn my flight  
To the salt wave of the Adriatic strand,  
And the waters of Eridanus: there the tears  
Of Phaeton's sisters weeping on the shore  
Fall amber drops on the purple deep.

I would fly to the green isles of the Hesperides,  
The gardens that in the sunset dwell,  
Where Atlas bears the weight of heaven's glory,  
Where the sea-lord will let sailors no more.  
Here lies concealed the holy graves of Zeus,  
The haunts of the Immortals, whence flow springs  
Ambrosial; and Earth who gives all life  
Increases too the happiness of gods.

A DISILLUSIONMENT  
David A. Haig

"Was this love?" I cried!  
When autumn leaves fell on your lovely hair.  
Flush with the joy of a fading day  
Side by side in selfless joy we lay;  
Your sadness and your joy I promised then to share  
After youth's mad zestful riot should subside.

Life before us stood revealed  
The sky, split by a searchlight's beam.  
My hand about your gentle shoulder went;  
A shout! our vows of love the heaving heavens rent:  
"Come trouble, strife, sorrow in never ending stream;  
Our love shall never yield."

And then all faded to redeem  
The shabby walls and lonely hours  
When loveless lifeless souls decay  
Till ghostlike they plod their weary empty way  
And reflect of love's o'erriding powers  
Even in a fleeting dream.

WALKING  
Keith Free

These July gymnasium days blow  
So hot, cold, off, on, I sweat, freeze  
In shivering morning rainbows  
Of silky light, gold sheen, walking near  
Hoses spraying on college lawns,  
Damp stalks ruddy in the warmth.

This currency, coined with eyes, nostrils, mouth  
A riches debasing the famous Khans'  
Won for nothing from an autumn park.

Yet to most, led up cement paths,  
The brown buildings stand citadel, sandstone  
Quadrate abstracts in an azure dome,  
Kingdom come cased in a dream of brass.

DAWN MOMENTS  
David A. Haig

Footsteps echoing in the empty streets,  
The solitary roar of one passing car,  
The gentle throb of a heart that placid beats  
While new light and dawn wind drift far  
Over the brick hills and stucco vales  
Now hidden in the black anonymity of night.  
Venus, wraith like in her beauty, pales  
And black hills are purpling in the cloud strewn light.

Look now to the south.  
There the bridge in bold relief outlined  
Stirs songs in the poets mouth  
And plucks the deep recesses of his mind.  
There the harbour, frozen by infant light  
Conceives reflections of the golden bluing light  
Outlines lose their starkness, new day bright,  
Plunders a treasure that no wealth can buy.

First feet flutter on the pavements broad!  
The sleeping city stirs. Proud echoes lose their force.  
First trams rolling out a harsh discord!  
The crowds are waking: ignorant without remorse  
For the beauty bought and broken whilst  
A sweaty sickly pallor is settling on the street,  
Furnished are the walls which peace and night have swept.  
The air is poignant with frustration and defeat.

IN MEMORIAM (to the Golden Cabbage)  
Richard Appleton

I'll tell you,  
She was as willing as me,  
As warm as the sand  
And as soft as the sea,  
But things just happened differently.  
I'll tell you,  
Only the people we knew  
Prevented the two of us  
Seeing it through...

I doubt if Odysseus  
Would keep face with ease  
If he knew distracting bastards like these:

One was pink  
Like a beer blotched cupid  
And said nothing true  
Nor yet appeared stupid,  
But teetered word pictures  
On the ears of the mob;  
He made discrediting motives his job.

And others had Talent, were mystic, were fey,  
They spoke of their souls  
While they probed for a lay,  
But we all were so frightened  
By Sigmund Freud's warning  
That we never identified bedmates till morning,

And then those who coupled  
Would pledge to be true ----  
At least till the next night's  
Drinking was through ----  
And she and I  
Well it can't really matter,  
But we got confused  
By the wine tinged chatter

And woke, re-mated, contentedly,  
Surprised at our new partner's adequacy...  
But I'll tell you,  
She was as willing as me.

GARGANTUA'S BIRTHDAY  
Julian Woods

Gargantua and Pantagruel were feasting just at dawn,  
Ten leagues from Paris on the castle lawn,  
They had enormous meats, oxen, gravies, spice,  
Heaped casks of beer and French wines cooled in ice.  
"My son,' said great Gargantua, "listen and take note,  
This belly stuff is parching and it clogs the throat,  
Swill, my boy, swill, and listen to me awhile -----  
It is just fifty years to this memorable day,  
Since my mother bore me in an immemorial way,  
Her overfeasting led to it and I came out  
With an afterbirth of earwax and a-crying for some stout."

"Father, here take this sucking pig and this ripe bowl,  
And from me accept what admiration can control,  
Take these words of praise, of little or no deceit."  
So saying Pantagruel rose from his seat.

"O son," the good Gargantua immediately replied,  
Here take this bottle and let that speech subside,  
I cherish your sentiments but let's consider done  
These ceremonious ways between the father and the son."

Pantagruel and Gargantua sat all day and feasted on the lawn,  
The five oxen eaten but the wine went flowing on,  
They talked tales of long ago and high philosophy;  
And their expansive wit was all the best of ribaldry,  
And the villages all crept as if in fear of prophets and divines  
As their belching roared like thunder in the pines.

MATINS  
Keith Free

A vision of Crow's Nest through a blue window  
Tepid water on my chest; the early light  
Slops yellow puddles on the soapy tiles.

Spiralling down from St. Leonard's Park  
Mixed with the bells of surrounding steeples  
Repeating their texts to all Sunday people  
Three starlings perch on the backyard fence;  
Below my cat gives them a considered glance.

Over the sill a cold breeze slides  
A hand of grey marble along my hide  
The pinky scent of soap informs me that  
I now smell Christian: the cat  
Ignores the starlings' chattering now  
In the sooty hazel; lithe clouds blow  
Across the pale blue; from below  
Fumes of bacon and black coffee grow.

LYRICAL REQUIEM  
Marie Kuttna

Silence brings on regrets: it revives  
the odd short-circuits of the twisting mind,  
its expensive right to screen old memories,  
to replay melodies from the singing past;  
though each note is a song of loneliness  
flicking at the shadow to keep its terrors off,  
or a love-song - flesh vibrant, forlorn call  
awaiting its echo from a distant wall.

The turning wheels and backward-turning reels  
torment consciousness until the curtains fall  
in silence, over all...

UNEASINESS  
Manfred Mackenzie

Three things that will dispel  
The heart from easy vagary -

A narrow line in air  
Where not of aircraft was -

On the laming breakage  
From an old storm's dark arteries,

Sight of glance aside a girl  
Will hide behind her eye -

O, glories where gods grind us  
Which heart denies, till it laugh thrice.

WELTSCHMERZ  
Marie Kuttna

To-day seems to have died on our hands -  
an uncared for patient, whose early loss  
hurts with sheer failure more than all past defeats.

The past - oh, apply that local anaesthetic!  
benumbed, to merge with it the history of some world.  
Worlds are collapsible gadgets for men who remember,  
who play with growing spirals when conviction is gone;

when only our despair echoes through time:  
don't go September! stay with us Spring!  
Living is everything.

and by now the present lies dead on our hands.
The Pauline Group, 27 July 1953

EVER AND AGAIN I SEE  
Robin Pratt

Ever and again I see  
The clock's face like a lettered moon,  
The tired wheel of the traffic slowly turning.

The fountain falling through the rain  
Languishes on polished stone.

Long, cold, divided in the air,  
The parting moment is apart,  
Falls suddenly:  
The sum of all these brief goodbyes  
Is no small tragedy.

FOR A PHILOSOPHER  
Judith Rayner

I have put out antennae from my mind  
And my flickers of delicate feeling  
Have glided over your brain, touched and twined  
About your heart; but my heart was a dreaming  
Morning citadel, and my flights of doves  
Were lost in the blossom-storm of your thought,  
Beating their wings against your learning, loves  
Too ancient for their gentleness. They sought  
The sunshine; feathers striking colour there  
And stirring the steel-crested clouds around,  
Circling the black and fainting waters where  
The grey dove-like Ophelia thoughts lie drowned  
In years; but I do not understand how deep  
The waters flow across the thought they keep.

DANAE  
Judith Rayner

When I was young I walked in auburn fire,  
Flinging a plume of sparks across the light.  
Now they have bound my flame within the tower  
Of brass, to hide me from the long dark night  
Of love. My longing eyes reflect strange thoughts -  
Lost purple irises by hidden streams,  
There the fawning sunlight slipped and caught  
Its dappled greenness where the water gleams.

But they cannot hide me from my lover,  
(My precious body, flamed of white and gold)  
His fruit-of-Autumn blood will soon discover  
My turret flares; and mimic suns enfold  
Me in embrace of gold; then let my flame,  
My auburn light, curl round the sky again.

I WALKED A-COMPANY WITH CLEAR MORNING  
Keith Free

I walked a-company with clear morning  
My way high-flung as any kite  
And I came in gay serfdom.

Thick channels, alive with intol'rable heat  
Loaded me my storm's deep centre.  
You were honey in my blood.

Now, this dry thistle, hard sown in my chest  
Tells me the locust hour is raw.  
And these dull eyes have rusted.

Now socketless winds, gull-hunted, stony  
With cold, saw across my fallow  
And this fear-fermenting heart.

SONNET, ON LOVE AS USUAL  
Marie Kuttna

Ye Gods! I remember how I asked for love,  
Expostulated for it, demanded its delights,  
Filed an application in every Heavenly Office  
Begging for it, or insisting on my rights...  
Yes, I remember how I desired love;  
Its intoxication, all its thorns and flowers -  
I wished for the heart-ache as well as happiness  
To fill my life, or while away long hours...  
At last their patience lost, the Administration  
Marked my case deserving, and sent me you,  
This is how I learnt the lesson about love,  
Though at first I was too dazed to know I knew:  
And now I can accept with equanimity  
The old definition: Just Insanity.

YOU AND I  
Marie Kuttna

The air suggests spring... I can feel its softness  
drawn intensely by my fingertips  
while sounds float in waves over the park  
and like trustworthy, faithful old comrades  
shine the streetlights.  
The breeze brings the scent  
of spring - spring invading distant, silent trees;  
an empty tramcar has just rattled by  
from your direction, and I realize  
how much I hoped you would be coming.

You could ring up. And... the evening is so soft,  
scented with warmth and starlight; and the noise  
of traffic and business rumbles far away.  
The streetlights have changed now into magic signals  
throwing their shimmer on dark shiny leaves, and I wonder,  
whether it was really more lonely in the past  
before I met you, and learned the meaning of spring moods  
than I am now, waiting for you, perhaps in vain.

MY SISTER KATE  
Jeff Miles

Helen was another star who, during the course  
of an epic, played to the crowd for a secret siege;  
but the boys in the neighbourhood recognized superfluity  
in the erotic subtlety of a wooden horse.

Aestheticians all, they find less perfection of form  
in a skull staining a silver plate - rather  
her emphatic curve of jellied truth, her well-rounded hips;  
they lack the consistency of introvert, the Baptist John.

No disciplined thousand crews will she shipwreck, nor  
condone the violence of heroic abnegation, for  
if harmony is beauty, she is exuberance;  
and in the ecstasy of function, we become  
the synthesis of king, saint and whore – a universal One  
in the unique and seductive nirvana of her shimmying.

THE ROCK  
Judy Forsyth

A rock, lonely on a shore's ruin,  
Waits for the return of the sea.  
Waits for the swelling tide to overrun  
Into the lee.

Once the waters heared about here.  
Long waves of shade, breaking in white  
Foam on a lichened rock, salty and clear  
In the sunlight.

And when the waters rose in storm,  
The gulls, driven from a windscoured sky  
Came here for refuge, the one stable hour  
On which to rely.

But now the sand embeds the rock  
On the beach, wind-silted it lies,  
Cast-up, while the birds wheel in flight to mock  
With raucous cries.

The earth draws the rock to its heart,  
And crumbles hard stone to soft sand.  
Identity, strength lost, it becomes a part  
Of the dry land.

CRIME WITHOUT CRIME  
David Haig

Forbidden fruit, contemptuous food  
This satisfaction of natural desire,  
"Filthy disgusting and rude."  
Sensitive body caught in a mire,  
Believing its substitute indecent,  
Seeking again its release,  
Shame after satiation recent  
Hoping for life to cease.

Cooped up, stored up life,  
Desire straining again to see,  
Yearning, sharp as a knife,  
(Oh God! Forgive me!)  
Week in and week out,  
Bursting forth at last sublime,  
Happy, exhilarated, liking to shout,  
And the student told - it is slime.

Reasoning plunged into melancholy,  
Impulsive, seeming, useless intrigue  
A face worried no longer jolly,  
A body keyed, seeking fatigue,  
A standard demanding curbing. Futility!  
The conscience wrongly victorious,  
A soul lacking utility,  
A fear racked mind, inglorious.

Spinsterhood, symbol of denial,  
Limiting man's power to appreciate bliss,  
Life wasted and useless, sterile,  
Hard unsympathetic, emotion amiss,  
Denying even inconsequential escape  
Freedom and life the great outrage!  
Perverting till man (self disgusted ape)  
And ostracism turns life's miserable page.

Oh! Let the youth make this appeal:  
This sin is not for God to Forgive  
But is merely for society to repeal.  
The sanctity of womanhood will live,  
Youth undenied of hope, now calm  
And free of ruinous mental strife,  
Using this mental cleansing balm  
Again shall have life.

EVENING SONNET  
David Haig

I thank the Lord for today;  
For sunshine on warm walls;  
For haze dulled mountains bathed in light;  
The red clouds of evening;  
The lone cow, who forlornly calls,  
Summoning her child to bay;  
For the love that knows no night  
But prompts my willing heart to sing.  
I ask for her eternal love;  
To be her tower of strength

Saved from the passing time;  
The power to lift our lives above  
The season's awesome length;  
Love, divine, untouched by hollow rhyme
The Pauline Group, 21 September 1953

A VISION  
Colin Black

In the moonlight I walked through grey meadows, the night was cold and my heart was dark. And when I came to a willow that lay on a little hill up from the river, I sat myself down upon a rock.

The moon's beams were soft but cold; the green was turned to grey, the river murmured alien from my ears, for life and the trees were still, but my heart was dark.

I thought not for the moonlight was no place for thought. I sat on the cold hard rock and its immutable chill became part of my being. Memories and sorrows, fair visions, forgotten loveliness approached my consciousness and murmured without. Soft winds stirred the sighing trees, the tiny spirits of the meadow rippled from the willow and the stone. A quivering hush was in the air as if something unknown was near. Unknown to all but me; for I knew who stood behind me, though I made no sound and did not turn my head.

The winds grew calm and stillness reigned more deep than before, and the night was afraid for we stood in the presence of the lady of all things dark. A cloud veiled the face of the moon; there appeared before me the Queen of the Night.

Tall and majestic, darkveiled in robes of black, she said no word, but came to me and her long soft-flowing robes brushed my face; she embraced my neck and held me, and her dark robes enfolded all my soul in touch of silk, and bonds of iron. She clutched my bosom and her long fingers entered my body and fastened about my heart; cold and dread, she touched my lips with a passionless kiss of death and despair.

"Soul of my sorrow, vision of my song of love and death, what will'st thou?"

She rose and held me with one cold hand, veiled in the other sleeve her far off countenance, ever to me blind. With voice of other worlds, of other time, of past existence never told she spoke:

"All things am I unto you; all past desires, all hopes, all memories. I signify the half-forgotten past, and I shall never leave you. Never for the memory of things past abides; these shades shall never vanish, for all your hopes and prayer. I am the soul incarnate of your living being, but I am beyond you. Look and see me what I am."

She drew close to me, and the veil was lifted from her face. I saw despair and envy, twisted illusions cold and hard; I saw the unhappy child and the rejected youth; old friends I saw and as I looked they laughed in hollow exultation, and I was deceived for they were serpents, Eastern horrors, demons and fantasies of fantastic night; all fears and sorrows then I saw, and visions of the things I held most dear, twisted and broken; the forgotten gown of intellect, the desperate muse of poetry and beauty, both turned from me in scorn, and laughed; nothing remained but cruelty and evil, disillusionment and misery and loneliness; I looked and saw the face of Ann smiling in mockery . . . .

The vision faded and I was alone; and the willow sighed and the night was cold, and my heart is still dark, for the light will never come.

VINCENT VAN GOGH  
Manfred Mackenzie

His mind had dreamed with menace  
Or lain swilled in brown resenting season;  
A rain ran above the making tide  
Left heat-smoking the cinder searock.

Confused, his vision rumoured  
Outward. The second day he met  
At noon envisaged in an orchard  
A girl whose body strung without relief.

'The green hedge violence, spring squirrel  
Vines, red earth that shouts a busy fire,  
This country holds seared corn that flaps  
Like sunflowers, fertile tinder evenings,  
A country bridged by vicinal summer  
Cyprus-pillared into autumn year.'  
These other days he sought with gold-bird wings  
The zero holyland of Byzantine,  
But too near fell embalmed in enameled sea.

THE YELLOW ROBBERS  
Manfred Mackenzie

There being several hills they chose  
This olive-grassed, under the low day sweat  
Of sun burnished through yellow tragique mask.  
O my enemies this unwell hot wind kisses me  
Like the Judas, waylain here I could never  
Slay it, too visible for accustomed secret foray.

But I would face this slate wind  
No eyes' wind, nor helmet anger, remember  
Words, their fixed bitter stubble, bound brain.  
Farm and ember. Heavy on the ridge we beat,  
Divide like pines. This laboured stake starts hoarse  
From furrow, creaking bursts ears, the torqued spirit

Now wait, wait for the rich man at the crossroads.  
These nails too have turned wise their eyes  
Upon my bones, the other's grief alloyed with silver  
Well, they launched us the soldiery's  
Complacent spear, asses eating nonchalant  
Palms, horses lack cries, the dry ruptured cry.

Then up-wind, the urgent words. Drum. What?  
O words of high thunder and words of rain.  
Their sodden storm of years flashes electric  
Deadly down boreal. Do not let them live,  
Not till the ceremonial furious Venetian.

[POEM]  
Judy Forsyth

Where are your dreams now?  
Lost in the sob of yesterday,  
Or caught in the twisted strands of future?

Where are your wide eyes  
And hands trembling for zeal?  
Your thoughts, bright new coins fresh from the mint?

Has your willingness been crushed,  
Stuffed back? Or like an eager child  
Been shaken into tears with thoughtless reprimand?

Has disillusionment cupped its hands,  
And held you like a struggling bee,  
Your buzz becoming an unheeded drone?  
Has your wide world been narrowed,  
Confined in the space of oncoming years?  
Professing their knowledge over your youth!

They rule their son's country.  
Over the meal they discuss war,  
While war itself gluts on the limbs of youth.

Must we all grow old and wise as this?  
I would rather die so young, still dreaming.  
Than live to ponder with a head full of grey age.

Give me a brush and I will paint it in the sky,  
Daub it in neons thru the cities glare,  
Use the newstands as easels for my canvasses,  
And watch while the indifferent critics stare.  
Give me a pen and I will write it on the water,  
Indelible it in ripples of the sea,  
Make the waves the turning pages of my book,  
And watch while the unheeding ships ignore my plea.  
Give me a tune and I will sing it thru the air,  
Whistle it along the night-shadowed streets,  
Croon it as love song where the lovers walk,  
And listen to the echo of unheeding feet.  
I will write them, I will tell them, I will sing them  
That their world is dead.  
They will not read, they will not hear, they will not comprehend  
What I have said.  
They will only stand and stare, misers all.  
Each man shrugging his shoulders at the wind's sigh.  
Each man living within the reach of his own hand.  
Each man pulling down the shade to hide the sky.  
The apathy, the awful apathy of staring men.  
And I? I will go and break my presumptuous pen.

OCCASIONED BY ITEM: CLERGYMEN JUDGING A BEAUTY CONTEST  
Keith Free

Adam everyman and lubra eve  
Grubbed their brown gods from the soil; felt the  
Barbarous earth, and were content only  
In the propitious season to conceive.  
Mr. Suburban with modern techniques  
Drilled deep for sex; tried the elusive key  
From door to door; frantic at length must he  
Crawl desert paths to kiss their horny feet.

Now Miss Universe, random-choice fella  
Sun-bathes beneath a striped beach umbrella;  
New mother earth, and his slick mother Olympian  
Smiles hugely for the cameraman.  
But dry the eyes. Look! Look! for here we see  
New miracles, cheeses-cake orthodoxy.

AUGUST  
Endre Ady  
translated by Marie Kuttna

Autumn had called on Paris yesterday.  
She was gliding along the Rue St. Michel.  
waving to leaves and branches on her way  
as she met me.

I was on my slow way to the Seine.  
Songs, like winter fires were smokily burning  
in my mind - little songs about pain,  
death, and yearning.

Autumn passed me, and whispered in my ear.  
The Rue St. Michel trembled to the sound: -  
a few playful leaves, flitting from the branches  
danced on the ground.

A second only while Summer hardly halted  
and laughingly silently Autumn left Paris.  
And I alone had known that she was here  
under the trees.

FROM A HAUNTED HOUSE  
Judith Rayner

In the lissome rain of the twilight  
I have seen boats bear down from light  
sad bays to the night,  
and in the morning their sound has opened out  
in dreams and under closed eyelids.

Morning has always come thus with  
translucence slipping through atmosphere;  
the moon, dead and blue-veined with memories  
of mountains, hanged in taut light in bare  
trees. Fears have grown brittle then as fires  
closed in the narrow clasp of sunlight.  
This safety is only half-down-smoky fading  
of clouds, feathered fullnesses of gulls' breasts  
and the water growing pink, flushing  
with webbed feet in the depths; then night  
returns, through the black hours  
rhythmic as scratched design. Our fear  
is remembered mist and flickered shadow,  
lumped skulls and empty skulls outside the fires  
and ghosts are acrid legacies from primitive  
minds, gliding surprised in thoughts and sensitive rooms.

TO A CZECHOSLOVAKIAN JEWISH MIGRANT WHO WAS IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP DURING WORLD WAR II  
Sue Vacchini

Perfectly your heart's strength is that tower  
brilliant contre la poussiere du monde.  
Puissant.  
Frail, frail were your bodies beneath war's brutality  
But your minds and hearts were strong  
Lighting one to the other a clean power  
Above war's brutality.  
And now, towering is your heart  
more bright  
holding hearts and minds  
that men gave you,  
their bodies, then, too frail for life.  
You keep within you  
A rabbi's last warning blessing  
A philosopher's last thought  
and the reality, that your body  
was less frail.

And you shall blaze  
Against the world's dust -  
That we lean to your clean strength  
knowing human to human, all minds and hearts.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  
Sue Vacchini

The old thin nights  
sing the winds like a plaintive reed  
into my heart,  
Discovering its unquiet purple.

O sing me back to the dreaming time  
old winds.  
Back to the Dreaming, Dreaming time  
When my heart was clear and still,  
When the air was silent...  
For now the air is tossed, wandering,  
Searching the Quiet that is lost,  
Crying among the lurching trees,  
For the Quiet;  
Making a restive purple of their hearts.

Once I glimpsed the Dreaming in the sun,  
Silently,  
Silently caught the green moment,  
And then  
My heart knew such a stillness  
That the restive purple  
Faded –  
In the green moment.

O but the bleak winds come  
Scattering the green-time dreaming  
Whirling me into the night again,  
For that,  
That which the trees and I and the winds  
Can never find.
The Pauline Group, April 1955

FEED THEM THAT FALL FROM THE TABLE  
Barrie? Gillman (B.W.F.G.)

"Twenty one years...  
Yes, twenty one years in a pinewood casket...  
Of my own particular design and selection  
_________________

"Twenty one times round the year.  
Too little time, yes too little time  
For recognition...  
_________________

"Soon the mating season...  
Life's own reason  
For duration

On this pottled earth...  
_________________

"Kindly ascribe my success to,

Licentious living...  
And an overabundance,  
Of would be spite...  
__________________

"Come and join me, in the sweet balloon of nature,  
And say that I loved this life fro greater reason,  
Than I would suppose...  
__________________

"Remember you seek life as you expected liberty."

__________________

Moderation and existence,  
Maximation and ultimation,  
Co-existence..."  
__________________

"Wonders and mysterious ways,  
Solve...  
And with solution...  
Grasp realization...  
___________________

"Brotherhood of elements  
Controlled supposition...  
____________________

"Speak upwards for the inclination,  
Is steep... And the way is of your life...  
____________________

"Trust men as you would deceive your maker".
The Pauline Group, 15 June 1955

[POEM]  
Jerry Nelson

O we have shattered the gift we found  
And turned to the love of ash. The grave  
Has bound us round. What can be saved  
In the hollow breast of the grave? We're bound  
In the ash of flesh, and the rose of pain  
Has blinded our hearts more than flame  
Could blind. O bind us Christ in thorns  
Again, when the heat of the heart that breaks  
In the ash, in the night, in the ground, is drawn  
To Him whose heart is fire and sweet,  
Whose heart in the rose of blood is bound.  
Come with the trumpet, Christ with the clash  
Of cymbals, come to the world of ash.

THE COAST  
John K. McLaughlin

Frost-white clouds in a sky of blue,  
While waves of green fall on the shore,  
And farther out the breakers roar,  
Where the sea takes on a lighter hue.

Rose-red cliffs near a golden beach;  
With flecks of fire the sea is lit,  
On the horizon the red sun split,  
As it slowly passes from our reach.

The sky is dusted with silver stars,  
And above the black and silent shores  
Hangs pale the crescent moon, which pours  
A misty light on sandy bars.

A SHELTER  
Manfred MacKenzie

What jumped queasily in my blood  
What thin fire upon the spines of trees  
Signed of multiplicity of cloud  
Come quick upon no ordinary breeze?  
Those mauve lightnings splayed aloud  
So livid quiet another might not hear  
Beneath blood (quiet as bone-white) so high and wide  
So strut, tower, flag or poplar did not bear

What willed then from that bland air;  
Then rain began on distant capes  
And broke on all of that geography;  
But I have seen as it rolls and leaps.

Rain fume of warship-bowed its masts ever  
Sealed in that imperilling fire, marauder  
Of my no man issued no man's weather.  
And I who had been the thunder's boarder.

Those contrived of wind and water times  
I count on fingers now, and from this shed  
Of ordinary brick where bodies give me room like rhymes  
I watch afar the wry small lightnings where they led.

ALL THE GRAPHITIC MESS  
Julian Woods

All the graphitic mess of men and engines,  
All the rasps of speech like unechoing iron,  
The frictive discords and bellow of combustion  
Are tucked away under Paddington and Glebe.

And it is quiet with evergreens on the calm lawns,  
Qualmless streetlights, and confident purring taxis,  
Blinking round the avenues, lilting on springs  
And all soft, all hush, the couples come out.

Under the bawdy moon goat-men still gambol  
And the mystic howls, north of the harbour,  
The ecstasy, the moment of perfect faith  
Over the first ceremonious sherry in the lounge.

Lifted up, the crushed peasant with his mountain barley  
Hand reaped in the rheumatic wind, the gift  
To the unsuperstitious prayer has been granted;  
Ah, Newton, you have roofed us from disconsolations

Of the cold vacuums between the tiny stars  
Why have I felt my terror between dead houses  
And the clean swept streets, the fence that doesn't rock  
With a face over a hedge in a startled silence?  
In the Riverina scrub it isn't more lonely,  
When it's so quiet you fear someone is just about to speak  
Stepping out of the leaves, talking in a loud voice  
In the afternoon hours of the omniscient watching fox.

Where will we hide when the burning bowels of history  
Erupt, and the world flexes its red arms?  
In the bitter periods, or where the raw tranquility?  
Ah, we are gods leaning back out of life and time.

Yet kept busy by the rip of Progress. My house  
Much of my property are out of date, seven  
Remarkable inventions since Christmas all  
For household application have kept me diligent.

And all my days are dreams of evenness,  
Love quiet, home comforts, pretty little wife,  
Two children planned cautiously between pay rises  
On anxious midnights of unstoppered fertility.

Born, and goosefleshed by the stimulant air,  
Re-enwombed and intended for sleep,  
Uneasy hints of a tearing birth but blessed  
Into blindness before they fear the dark.

MY LOVE MUST FALL TO GRIEF  
Jerry Nelson

My love must fall to grief. She understands  
The rose shall burn to ash in furnace heat  
And I shall lurch alone in Savage lands  
And curse the sightless power that turned my feet  
Away. Yet I must turn to darker wine  
Than wine-deep eyes and wander stranger streets  
In stranger lands with darker nights than mine,  
And eat a bitter bread of bitter wheat,  
And I must kiss untender cheeks and lips.  
This burning burden bares me slender down  
And grief has wrecked a thousand fragrant ships.

EPITAPH FOR A WALK  
Mari Kuttna

All life is useless... only in raw clay  
can questioned meanings remain unresolved.  
The looping pale clouds will perhaps release  
the earthy undulation of today and yesterday;

The mauve woodsmoke, the evening-scented sky,  
rescue me from my own hearing and sight,  
turn me from the point of my own return:  
from a voice that falls softly from twilight at sea,  
and the unquestioning glance of an eye.

Not the single notes, but the theme in a fugue  
can drown this sense of endless nonarrivals,  
save me from the slowly-tightening loop  
of a voice that rustles like leaves on dry grass,  
and its undulation through the salt air at night.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY  
John Croyston

Humpy-Dumpty sits on a window sill  
the air of eyes droughting round his  
merged head: soldiers lay leaves  
for his Columbus crushed solution  
on the thumbs down Gladitorial ground.  
That the sailors were as soft as the sea  
And the sea tear-wet and warm

He'd sat, noisily, wrapped in newsprint,  
(some pasted on the pane) saying, "What a good egg am I,"  
and while his hen claimed precedence in the yard  
a wolf damaged a flower, and all the falling leaves  
couldn't keep Humpty from falling.  
That the laurels were loud in the wind  
And the wind without a storm.

Winter and the heaven petals bone the boughs  
and hide the house, and silence moves on the house  
the dove-white yard and the laurel tree.  
The cygnet moves, and cracks the stillness  
A dove hears snows are in the sun  
And the Ark is of an acorn.

MICE  
Julian Woods

A mouse is a beautiful and intricate creature  
Observing one on the stove in search of food,  
The features seemed so precise and alive,  
That his smallness appeared only concentration,  
And our fear of mice I thought  
Stems from this keen tinyness.

But not only this. Seeing one on the floor  
It was evident why women panic and call for help.  
Mice do not run directly away from you  
They merely canter across the floor at an odd angle,  
As though escaping in a different medium altogether.  
And that whisper of hurrying feet  
And low carried head, can hardly be called escaping  
For it gives the impression  
That at any moment the mouse will accomplish  
An Einstein space-time curve  
And suddenly confront him on even terms.

A WOODCUT FOR CEZANNE  
Manfred Mackenzie

He was of a hardy mind  
Who touched in fruits beneath the rind  
But whose transgression was not to see  
Beyond the fruit of the apple tree.  
I do not think, for instance, that in pears  
He felt that jealous prudent seed that's theirs.  
Yet we know the apple is more primary  
Though in his kind of conservatory  
I cannot think that the natural sun  
Quibbled much over either one.

THE BEGGARS  
Judith Rayner

As beggars before the autumnal town  
With its last strained beauty of taut tall trees,  
Who left their summer's fields, coming down  
From trembling, spun stallion, mist on muscle  
Hills, finding under seamould plated spires  
Empty streets and sleep bedraggled birds,  
Are those who seek within their restless hours  
To touch another's mind with patient words.  
Not so friendless the stranger in fine cities  
As those who in sole thought may penetrate  
Perceiving alone; and no one pities,  
With the radiance of some welcome state,  
(Neither church nor charitable women,)  
When their loneliness overwhelms them.

LINES FROM MACEDON  
Marie Kuttna

If destiny is the strength of our desires  
years abstract the power from the dynamos of fate.  
The art of winning, in art and other matters,  
comes with some practice. I came and saw  
but conquest unrolls no worlds for new possession  
no, I can only turn to sack the towns  
I held before. So I remain  
in control of many a field of skirmish  
but fight decisive battles all alone,  
myself against myself, once again.  
O god of dreams, grant me a new desire!  
the ones I had have fallen by the way.

LIBRARY  
John Croyston

In the evening he reads dreams  
hour housed and roof-warmed  
in the long room. He blinked tired years  
from his quiet eyes.

There is none to fill his fingers  
or his slippers, or tie knots in his life.  
none to spin morning on a cup of tea  
or feel time on the seconds of his pulse.

There is no time. Living is a timeless  
change of place and oscillation of crowds;  
and dying is the way he lives,  
and the colourless ache of autumn.

So he comes with fumbling feet  
blackened against the cold,  
his aspen hands floundering on a table  
his head on a book reading dreams.

THE BARGAIN  
Manfred MacKenzie

Times after I thought those same words spent  
On early articles I know never bought  
Were words gone. Re-encountering them  
I see that wary fruit that's something man instead  
Was bought and ask, is there not wondering.  
Which time to thought it would be demanded why  
I did not give to rare trade a name  
Of better grace. If what punished much ago  
Began than its more fatal altered way  
I have praised now that so courteous dawn.

ON THE BEACH  
Keith Free

As molluscs, prone on bearded shelves  
From globeringal ooze secrete their pearls,  
So this morning in my mind seems  
To form the lattice of a crystal scene,  
A precarious dazzling tissue that holds  
The sand, the bay, and our outstretched selves  
In diamond that is never old.  
As molluscs gird their blueish valves  
With horny chambers for their tendril souls,  
Our added pleasure, from this means  
That all our pleasures that have been  
Are helmet linings for our tender skulls.  
As marble artifacts sunk in a marsh  
Crust with chalk and lose their chiseled life  
So months will coat this sand and sun, the past  
(Excepting the interior crystallites).

MY LOVE MUST GRIEVE  
Jerry Nelson

My love must grieve in distant lands  
For Christ has claimed my heart and hands,  
And wretched I in sorrow leaving  
Have lost my heart in time for grieving,  
And I in hiding cannot hide  
From their blameless bleeding  
Nor from the ceaseless rushing tide  
Of hopeless voices crying  
In their wizened needing.  
Their mouth unfed, the living dying  
O land of fire  
O night of tears  
O day of sighing.

FREUDIAN IN THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS  
Keith Free

The sun, through red cirrus and strata of pall  
Sinks into black Botany's factory rim.  
Of Plato's Eternal, he was the mighty symbol  
And poets thought its sapience shone thro' them.  
He acquired a myriad fiery names  
And poets were his phantom instruments  
Till, grappling with the richer idioms  
In their daementia, the word became the sun.  
But in a different garden I have daily wrought  
Scorn those projections of unhealthy sap  
Know that the muse is refleshed thought,  
Infant echoes from the mother's lap,  
Know that the roses in the brain  
Are rooted in the crippled loins,  
Know that living, like night's subversive bands  
Infiltrates our mental states  
Now block by block, its crowds expand  
A dark bile through my glands  
As workmen pour from factory gates.  
And in a disease of brownish gold  
The shrivelled sun slips  
Away before invasion  
Then clouds swarm down like negro lips  
The dark! The dark! The dark has won!  
Now left, now right  
Form and figure, one by one  
Unform into the normal night  
I stand still in the darkening street  
My stupor culls me from the world  
The skin of my body is a papery grey  
My brains golden abscess drains quite away  
O my sicklie soul! Looke to me!  
Is this the Vision, the Triumph?

AT THIS TIME  
Dick Appleton

III  
Nipples expectant  
And white thighs writhing...  
And after said time  
The birth-puckered crying,  
From these  
(failing tablets)  
The music receding,  
From these,  
Kin to sea-snail,  
Our essence of being.

Choice of Nirvana, Dioce,  
Or a neither, new, but Human,  
A life that thrives on living,  
(with regrets to Cardinal Newman)

Sharply  
Like bars silhouetted,  
Smoothly  
On seas over-mastered,  
To stalk the streets  
Outstare the signs,  
Though the axe falls after...

(the sea-snail shrinks  
from the dark-cut shadow,  
our minds, our essence,  
might flinch so tomorrow)

Mind lurches,  
Jerks the time-wheel on;  
Time falters  
When its hub is gone.

ZIG-ZAG  
John Greenstone (sic)

The zig-zag dreams  
Blaze in various states of disrepair,  
The fierceness of imitators, the corruptible goodwill,  
Time-heaves, owl-echoes, syllables of smoke  
Understandably.  
In the plastic citadels of despair  
Board is free but souls are thallium  
In some attic poetlings brew coffee  
As warrior of something or other, no matter.  
He can be thankful for the little things of life.

What is the word to use? Now that  
The H-bomb has been invented in bedrooms  
A pink gust of powder.  
What irony! Dance the square dance,  
Quote the sporting advertisement  
Rather then weep over tissue paper  
Yet it seems to us that must die  
And go into the grave that we  
Hugging a pair of friable thighs  
What the old solid edifices teach;  
Drum-gray, tear shaking humiliations.

LA COMEDIE HUMAINE  
Richard Appleton

Sauce for Saints and sauce for Sinners  
Spices for Honore's dinners,  
Saints shall thrive in ordered bliss,  
Sinners thrive on something 'less':

These will sculpture life to patterns  
And sip 'X' beers to every pay,  
Those will bed them down with slatterns  
And guzzle claret when they may;

These will weep at planned-for sorrows  
And shoulder griefs with tautened lip,  
Those, feel fear for all their morrows,  
Fore-seeing soon the Final Slip;

These will age with querulous yearning  
Begging smiles for gifts they've strewn,  
Those will wake to blear-eyed mornings  
Wake to fear they've always known.

Gall for Saints and gall for Sinners  
Victuals at the Devil's dinners,  
Saints shall die in beds of pain,  
Sinners sharply die......Again.

MY DECEIT  
Terry Driscoll

Beyond the wharf  
grey rocks, bone smooth  
reject the speckled waters,  
and from the hill  
reflections  
polish their shadows  
on debris  
on the water's edge.

The street carries wind  
along the fences,  
fences that line  
an infinity of footpaths  
as they frame a gathering  
of empty trees.

And from the road beyond,  
Her voice beckons,  
beckons from the street of Sirens  
from the highway  
of my deceit.
The Pauline Group, no date

KREMLIN COLD  
John Croyston

Kremlin cold  
and Pentagon pride  
these are the reasons  
why Henry died.

He poor chap  
is the helled word  
"Christ", or the cry  
of Angels to their God;

he is the blood  
that washed the lamb  
and he is the blood  
that left the lamb;

he is the sword  
and he is the hand  
and he is the flesh  
and the matted sand

And Henry is you  
and Henry is I  
and his mouth is sweet  
with his own soft eye.

THE HARE  
Julian Woods

We saw a hare travelling across country  
Between houses by the open pasture,  
Gambolling, loping, taking his time,  
In full daylight, ruffled by the winter wind.

The creature's vision of things struck us.  
He noted, he avoided, he was careful,  
We were just conditions of his purpose  
As one of the professionals he went nonchalantly by.

He paused at the metal road for a moment  
Ears straight with energy, back curved like a spring,  
Over the road he went, an important traveller,  
With something surely there at his destination.

FLIGHT OF THE QUEEN ANTS  
Julian Woods

Out of the gloomed air  
And the wind's torrent  
The ants came scattering,  
Whirled in their mad millions.

They flew and settled,  
And deftly laid their gauze wings down,  
And their bodies twisted away  
Frantic with desire.

THE SEAGULLS  
Julian Woods

On the windy straits  
To the steamer's horn  
The seagulls are skimming  
The flying foam.

Windy circles  
And three-pronged feet  
Passing the bay  
Where the white waves beat.

Admirals, sailors,  
Leathery fishermen  
Sink down in the sea  
Where the gulls can't get them.

Ignorant tourists  
Throw over crumbs,  
They pick the offerings  
Of all foreign lands.

The bell, the buoy  
And the lighthouse tower  
Send to the sailors  
Hour upon hour

The menace of water,  
The drift of the tide,  
Anxiety in storm  
If the shoal is wide.

While the gulls play wide  
On the ragged seas,  
Windy particles  
Of the Antipodes.

MEETINGS  
Keith Free

A few minutes either way was sufficient  
But the hero's flaw, the gypsy's curse is coincidence  
Approaching here, book under arm, a man in the street  
Now recognized as an acquaintance; and you meet.

Confusedly at the intersection I become  
Step out of the moving photograph and doff  
The everyday magic cloak; safe through the world of dwarfs  
Now defined as he thinks I am.  
For he is the poisonous spy, the unrevealed birth mark;  
You are forced to see the fact of aimlessness  
And that, as each fumbles with the immediate past  
That all only know anyone more or less,

Some feel this more poignantly than I did, ever,  
Talk on anything; produce the detaining cigarette  
Till suddenly the definition is a stranger......

Especially at night, when the city only has a railway voice,  
And a sole survivor, you follow the tram lines home;  
From the tunnel of your introspection you run into someone  
Stand for awhile, or have coffee in a smoky shop  
And reading between the lines of the conversation  
You both squat at the entrances of your caves of gloom  
Appalled at the pattern, and the metropolitan rite  
Of half knowing many people; ushered thro' the showroom  
Then exit on the footpath - So long - Good night.
The Pauline Group, no date 1955

THE RAT  
Colin Black

I read of a rat entering a child's bedroom  
In Redfern, and pictured the creature's progress  
Coming in stealthily, smelling, surveying,  
His way, then purposefully up the bedpost.

The exploit, the fertility of the thing struck me,  
The beast's assurance and calculation:  
His brown-bigness passing for a cat's size,  
The subtle directness of his deceit.

He walks with purpose up the body  
Beneath the blankets, which wakes up,  
Sees only the familiar cat beside him  
Crawling up his neck, but is mistaken.

DIRGE FOR NOVICES  
Julian Woods

Timidly, with some fear and wavering,  
Adventuring with others of a kind  
To be within the self an unreflecting king  
Leaving the days of vassalage behind.

To reach more than a vacant isolation,  
But a real lion quality sheathing its own claws,  
If only a roaring silhouette on the barren horizon  
It will concern the myriads, make them pause.

And then when age old aches grow strong  
To work out through the nostrils even pity  
In strictly personal answers, and before very long  
It will be the outline for a mighty city.

The chorus for such a fancy has long been sniggering,  
The frill-neck lizard, rock like and proud  
Stiffly erect will defy the most powerful thing,  
Yet looks ridiculous before the jaws of the mongrel crowd.

And let us take for ourselves this sign  
That a true peace comes and tyranny relents,  
Two drunken envoys toasting as they dine,  
It's friendship at last between two continents.

REMONSTRATION  
Richard Appleton

Certain poets who should know better,  
Have bid me mind my subject matter,  
Supposing - and they do no doubt -  
My words might twist my brains about;  
But matter, words, or other media  
Are slaves...  
To onomatopoeia.

LAMENT FOR THE CORRUPTION OF NOBLE QUALITIES  
Jeremy Nelson

The hawk has fallen,  
Wounded from flight  
To a desert of frost and fire.  
He has cracked in the cold of the night  
The flint of his carnal desire,  
The arrow of rage  
Has hunted with iron the stone of his heart  
In the height of his craving years:  
The years that he hunted for power alone,  
Still the rat was careless in mocking his fears  
While the heart of the hawk had flown.

[POEM]  
Julian Woods

The ragings of ravishing time,  
The unspent hunger of insensible time,  
The aspects of decay, the roars of death,  
Volleys, shots, and curses flying,  
Crusts and shells and skeletons,  
Their charges scooped away.

One of its relics whimpers around us,  
Crying for an old glory.  
Something gone and descended into the dust  
Stirs and sings in the shadows,  
Grinning skull of Christ  
And cross-bones stretched on high  
Beckon the living to the dead  
And death has a double victory  
For it is so easy to go,  
A much easier thing to do  
Than leave heroic relics of your own.
The Pauline Group, September 1955

"NIGHT SOUNDS AND REALIZATIONS........."  
Barrie (?) Gillman. (B.W.F.G.)

Standing on the underbrush  
Of deferential underlip  
Listening to the awesome silence  
am I...  
Endeavouring to discover why  
The sounds that thrive in the  
encompassing quiet...  
Are not visible tonight......

Picture me...  
Trying hard to capture  
the invisible unsung songs  
As warm and various as love  
The wild lyrics  
of whispering nature......

The virtuous white dove  
That exists in my slumbering  
drugged breast,  
Thrives on me...  
the  
pillow  
pain  
and  
jealousy  
At its own request  
More fool I  
For seeking out the judge of consciousness......

Reprieved from the guilt  
of young ideals  
I am the spirit sponsor  
Who takes kinship  
With the credulous sons  
Of human decency...  
Now,  
I ask myself... ring out the night sounds  
with all available clarity......

I am burning candles  
Tall and stutter faultless  
To a higher hero beacon  
of illogical warning  
known love...  
And ghettos of sanely  
incremental duress flicker plainly......

Don't...  
Try and claim the national sounds  
of darkness,  
Nor...  
Endeavour to attain the bouncing  
mirror moon  
For the most relaxed of noble words  
I found with surprise  
Is hidden in your sparkling eyes  
And...  
Is called life..................

"HOMINO, HOMO, LUPUS......TCH, TCH...MAN"  
Barrie (?) Gillman (B.W.F.G.)

Sunday living  
Sweetly sighing  
Creptoc...  
Ribjoint...  
Paris, New Jersey......

People crawling  
Babes in harm  
Cheapskate,  
Elusive,  
Green cod...  
Abusive  
Man among the elephants......

Day of God  
and  
salted cod  
Cars  
and  
Bars  
and  
Etruscan art.........

Buck eyes  
White skin  
Fleecy lawns  
Wide striped  
'lescents,  
Bearing within  
Their Sunday presence  
Hatred  
and  
Gin............

Street curbed desire  
High corner  
Slats  
and  
Tats  
Fish love eyes  
Braids  
and  
Jades  
Integrated surprise.........

Pleasant  
soft  
hell,  
The old church  
wrinkled warden,  
possessed  
of  
a  
hard bell  
Verdent vibrations  
in  
the  
air  
Scale and zebras  
The running stations  
My Aunt Agatha  
Black lace  
Tinselled  
voice  
Hypocritical face  
What  
a  
way  
To incline a head............

Terra cotta  
and  
me  
Canvas hammocks  
the  
young  
oak  
tree  
magnificent  
repressions  
the  
little  
bitch  
across  
the  
avenue  
Life is bloody.........

Shetland 'overs  
village  
concerts  
hardware  
stores  
and  
family  
bores  
interstellar  
intuition  
I  
will be  
the  
last  
person  
to  
go  
to  
the  
moon amen, vale, tch, redic...

My  
name  
is  
black  
opposed  
to  
royal  
and  
yellow  
is  
not  
even  
a  
colour  
besides  
olive  
is  
grained  
with  
J.C.'s  
contusions  
This is he never live but let alone.........

"PLACID CONCEPTIONS AND I........."  
Barrie (?) Gillman (B.W.F.G.)

I am so  
terribly impatient  
Like a confidential register  
Speed through inarticulate ideas  
(Been doing it for years)  
Making horrible decisions  
Beating my head  
on a literary banister  
Having the darned poetic  
premonitions............  
Hear this...  
from a friend, the popular trend  
(about me)  
"Wonderful chap  
quite a fertile  
imaginative brain  
But... every time he  
writes or plays... I'm  
positive he does it  
in a daze......  
(Doesn't quite know  
what he's doing or saying)......

Ah yes...  
The gropers  
(Like me)  
Must endeavour  
to live wisely... and see  
(and hear)  
All that is to be seen  
(and heard)  
Like music... the chime  
(and rhyme)  
That is...  
Of the herd...............

It's rather odd you know  
But...  
(Disregard the grimace on my face)  
every time I look  
backwards over my right shoulder  
I seem...  
to fall naturally into place...  
_____Retrogression??.........

Par example...  
I am an elegant Viennese bakery  
Which churns out...  
(delicately)  
Much mocha cake,  
For Dorothy and...  
Out of Towners...  
Yes,  
Just for their sake  
I am in existence............

I am inclined  
rather to overemphasise,  
The natural alien tidbits  
Like stepped down, swept up  
colour  
and noncommittal composition............

I remember  
yes I recall  
Whilst as a paying member  
Of the...:  
"Philosophical Excursions Association"  
I was rapped on the back by a rather  
enormous apparition,  
Namely...  
"Dorothy in the shape of a cylindrical gas tank"  
I attach importance to this trifle  
Because I seem to realize,  
That it signifies something  
If... not all,  
Like corduroyed beplaided bibbies,  
And,  
A brightly painted  
rubber ball............

The only thing at present  
I can visualize... those two  
ruby pendants...  
dangling from the jades immortal  
eyes...  
And yogis shrieking to the skies  
Whilst hanging from the ceiling  
by  
chancy  
woven  
must  
have  
absolute  
faith  
ties............

I wonder  
if life means as much  
to you  
Or rather means anything  
...... at all

... Cheers!!!
