#bruce dawe

[melusinemuse]

And A Good Friday Was Had By All Bruce Dawe

You men there, keep those women back and God Almighty he laid down on the crossed timber and Old Silenus my offsider looked at me as if to say nice work for soldiers, your mind’s not your own once you sign that dotted line Ave Caesar and all that malarkey Imperator Rex

well this Nazarene didn’t make it any easier really – not like the ones who kick up a fuss so you can do your block and take it out on them Silenus held the spikes steady and I let fly with the sledge-hammer, not looking on the downswing trying hard not to hear over the women’s wailing the bones give way the iron shocking the dumb wood.

Orders is orders, I said after it was over nothing personal you understand – we had a drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn’t a patch on you

then we hauled on the ropes and he rose in the hot air like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread so it seemed over the whole damned creation over the big men who must have had it in for him and the curious ones who’ll watch anything if it’s free with only the usual women caring anywhere and a blind man in tears.

[perkwunos]

Bruce Dawe

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

fringe of sky

 #TahquamenonFalls by @Mike_Lawie blows our mind!  #UpperPeninsula

* * * * * *

"However, what he enjoyed most of all was when they went to the late show at the local drive-in, on a clear night and he could see (beyond the fifty-foot screen where giant faces forever snarled screamed or make incomprehensible and monstrous love) a pure unadulterated fringe of sky, littered with stars no-one had got around to fixing up yet: he’d watch them circling about in luminous groups like kids at the circus who never go quite close enough to the elephant to get kicked." Bruce Dawe, from “Enter without So Much as Knocking” (via whisperthatruns)

[whisperthatruns]

However, what he enjoyed most of all was when they went to the late show at the local drive-in, on a clear night and he could see (beyond the fifty-foot screen where giant faces forever snarled screamed or make incomprehensible and monstrous love) a pure unadulterated fringe of sky, littered with stars no-one had got around to fixing up yet: he'd watch them circling about in luminous groups like kids at the circus who never go quite close enough to the elephant to get kicked.

Bruce Dawe, from “Enter without So Much as Knocking”

[urbanwronski]

Title: “The Carbon Question Time” – A Liberal Return to Canberra

Tonight a rare first. Bruce Dawe. Yes? No. It’s the poet Bruce Dawe, not the Bryan Dawe we meant to invite. Look it’s an easy mistake and we are being honest about it. Yes. Of course John Clarke is in it. Bryan? As part of our ABC consumer guarantee, a “what were you expecting?” segment will follow this. Setting: ABC Radio Studio, Canberra. A modest roundtable with papers, microphones, and a…

Title: “The Carbon Question Time” – A Liberal Return to Canberra

[ohno-poetry]

Homo Suburbiensis - Bruce Dawe

One constant in a world of variables

A man alone in the evening in his patch of vegetables,

and all the things he takes down with him there

Where the easement runs along the back fence and the air

smells of tomato-vines, and the hoarse rasping tendrils

of pumpkin flourish clumsy whips and their foliage sprawls

Over the compost-box, poising rampant upon

the palings ...

He stands there, lost in a green

confusion, smelling the smoke of somebody's rubbish

Burning, hearing vaguely the clatter of a disk

in a sink that could be his, hearing a dog, a kid,

a far whisper of traffic, and offering up instead

Not much but as much as any man can offer

- time, pain, love, hate, age, ware, death, laughter, fever.

[amelodie]

The Cornflake

When Greek women drop a piece of bread from the table On picking it up they kiss it. But what shall we do with the petty cornflake? It shares the tragedy of all small nameless unsacramentalised things - Absurd as dandruff or scabs Who shall plead for it? Its future   is written in its sweet anonymous present. It is mush in the act of becoming. It cries for its milk like its Mamma. It had no one to love it outside the commercial. It is so frail and insincere, drifting into gullets   as the autumn leaves in a large city   make irresistibly for gratings - who cares what brief   balletic sprightliness it displayed rattling from waxed packets? There are no connoisseurs of the cornflake. Its lyricists (all save one) are in it for the money. There are none to sing its praises, to run appreciative finger-tips of language over its beauties, as with its sister the snowflake. It is the victim of history - kings could have made it famous, Peasants in folklore could have endowed it with a humble fame - Instead the cornflake is one with the commuter to whom Even the intelligentsia have forbidden nobility. Ah, but the revenge of the cornflake is memorable! Spooned Joyfully by wild infants on kitchen walks, it soon hardens To the durability of concrete. There, where the high-chair stood,                                                        it clings, Resisting the last hurried damp cloth, the sponge, the pot-scourer, Often outlasting, it is said, several successive families...

Drifters

One day soon he’ll tell her it’s time to start    packing, And the kids will yell “Truly?” and get wildly    excited for no reason, And the brown kelpie pup will start dashing about,   tripping everyone up, And she’ll go out to the vegetable-patch and pick    all the green tomatoes from the vines, And notice how the oldest girl is close to tears    because she was happy here, And how the youngest girl is beaming because she   wasn’t. And the first thing she’ll put on the trailer will be    the bottling set she never unpacked from    Grovedale, And when the loaded ute bumps down the drive    past the blackberry-canes with their last    shrivelled fruit, She won’t even ask why they’re leaving this time,    or where they’re heading for —she’ll only remember how, when they came    here, she held out her hands bright with berries,    the first of the season, and said:    ‘Make a wish, Tom, make a wish.’

Bruce Dawe

Australian Poet  

(15 February 1930 – 1 April 2020)

[bookstand]

Vale Bruce Dawe, Australia's 'Poet of Suburbia'

Vale Bruce Dawe, Australia’s ‘Poet of Suburbia’

Lennon Cheng/Unsplash, CC BY

Kevin John Brophy, University of Melbourne

“Katrina, I had in mind a prayer, but only this came,” Bruce Dawe wrote to his infant daughter, new-born, in intensive care, her life in the balance, declaring as poets must that their poems are the best and only real gift they can give.

I did not know Dawe, who died aged 90 on Wednesday, but I knew his poetry from my…

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