Victory is ours!

The fields of Elysium lay spread before us,

We stride forward, you and I, with accomplished deeds,

We will take control of these fields as our prize,

The crown of conquering heroes shall be ours.

And though I know not your name,

Nor you know not mine, we march together,

In common age and dignity,

Leave the dying and debased to loot and rob,

The decaying ruins left on the field of battle,

THAT..is their only capacity, having stood idle,

While we battled all our lives for this day,

To have to endure their low mockery at our age,

THEY..who lack the skills and have not wit enough,

To even know when they should lay quiet…and listen!

So, we will ride away from their barbarian schemes,

Taking with us the prize of our wisdom and knowledge,

In silence shall we scorn and disdain their cries of assistance,

When they come with pitiful eyes and lost souls clamouring.

Their world of material hunger is not now our world,

We leave them to their grasping greed and detritus,

For we have left their dominion,

With our accrued age and knowing,

We will forge a new homeland, a new beginning,

To greet the sunrise and hail the evening,

With a light in our eyes and clarity of mind,

Would dazzle the brightest star in the galaxy,

Come now, my company of aged heroes..

The battle for our independence has been won,

Upon the Fields of Elysium, we ride to a new dawn..

Victory is ours!

(This is a poetic testament to all us older citizens of the world..for while we be mocked, used and abused in aged care and home…then ignored in public debate..WE..who have survived to this age in a world of mostly grasping and materialist cruelty, have already won our battles, sown our seeds and reaped our crops..and now we claim our “Elysium Fields” as the right of conquering heroes!..yes..victory, be it great or minor..at this age, no matter..it is ours!)

History has passed me by.

‘Tis with a sweet touch of melancholy,

I reflect upon my mood today,

‘Twas one of a multiple of simple sayings,

My Irish gran’ had perchance to say..

*

“What you have not gained by age forty-five,

You will never have, no matter the age you survive”.

Now here I am, accrued my three score and ten,

And what I have not gained comes to taunt me again.

*

My moment in history has indeed passed me by,

That moment most desirous for myself to say,

“I am surrounded by what best pleases me, I may,

Now indulge in delicious fantasies, night and day”.

*

But now, in this ghastly, digitalised, parody of life,

I tread soft footfalls to avoid unnecessary strife,

Trying to conjure those spirits of esoteric, fantastic ,

Who do nought but tease me, dancing delightfully erotic.

*

My moment in history may have passed me by,

But in this velvet hiatus of aged life I lay,

Kaleidoscope dreams embracing me by night,

To secure me from snares the wild world lays.

*

And though I ought regret those few chances lost,

They were but fliting moments, chanced on a coin’s toss,

So ‘twould be churlish to recall such opportunity missed,

Then go curse life and all it promised..as but a Judas kiss.

*

(On the moment of Albert Namatjira’s passing.)

Albert :  Tjamu!..come…I call you as an equal to come to speak with me.

Tjamu*:  I am here, Namatjira…I never go away….What is it you want?

A :        No advice…THAT.. I have had plenty…No…now I want you to listen..for I have come to my last days…and I want to reason my situation.

Tj :        Your situation, Namatjira?

A :         Yes..my situation, for as you can see, I am back to where I started…a hovel for a home, myself deserted, left alone and the shame of jail time hanging over my name.

Tj :        Yes…as I warned..once you ventured into white-man’s territory, you were a marked man.

A :         I can see that now…but I keep asking myself..: “What did I do that so enraged them?”…for I was but an artist…many lauded my works and paid a lot of money for them..I was told that I was so very clever…a genius..some would exclaim!…I raised no alarm for radical change, no call to protest or arms to our peoples…I was no trouble to their administration…why the hatred?

Tj :       Yes, Namatjira…you were all those clever things to them…except…except..you brought your talent from inside of you…you brought the colours of the land from deep in your soul…you needed only little training you needed NO coaching, for the world of your paintings was already captured within you…..and THAT is why they hated you…you made look easy what THEIRS had to struggle and torment themselves over…

A :        But they have their great painters, their adored artists…I was no threat to that.

Tj :       Oh..but you WERE, Namatjira…you were!…your use of their ochres as a wash of colour threw their world into disarray…while they wrestled with a creation of false realism, just like they wrestle with their false God, you swept your landscapes with the reflections of the sky and the hunger of the earth…you live and breathe the faith of your people…you didn’t need their God or their instructions..You didn’t need them, but they needed you…and like their God they crucified to save their souls, so you have been crucified to save their culture.

A :       You saw this happening, Tjamu…and you warned me..but could not stop it happening…and yet it did happen…and now I am lost…I am homeless and dying here in a misery of a camp…

Tj :       Yes, Namatjira…it did happen..as it was always going to happen..as it will happen for a long time yet to come…till we tear away the bonds that tie us down..But come, Namatjira…you are not lost but passing..for you are ‘on country’ ..YOUR country..you are under our own sky, within reach of our water..all you need to do now is arise from your slumber and walk your country.

A :        MY COUNTRY, Tjamu?…

Tj :       Why yes, Namatjira…your country..the landscape you have painted…your visions of your dreams..it awaits you Albert…come..walk with me into your world…

A :        Yes, Tjamu…I come…

End.

The back of the whole stage lights up with a Namatjira landscape…( I envision a projected picture is used on a backdrop..and as Albert starts to walk with Tjamu, smoke raises and the projected picture is formed on the smoke and Albert walks into the ‘picture’ and disappears off the stage to end the play)..

*Tjamu is the central Aust’ indigenous word for “Grandfather”.

A close friend told me that not long before their mother passed away, she was given a “smartphone” by her children so as to be ready reachable and in case of emergency…they paid the connection fees etc. all she had to do was sign on.

Of course, signing on to such services has a security obligation and so one is called upon to use identity clues for a secure connection..clues that no other person will know…but being older, she knew from experience that she had best write those clues down just in case she would be called upon to repeat them verbatim at some future time.

So there, under the lid of the box the smartphone came in was a slip of paper with three items that were the answers to three obvious requests from the service provider..:

“My first pet ..: ‘ Taby’..”

“I was called ..: ‘ Peggy’ when young.”

” My parents met in the city of ..: Sydney”

These three little insights into a past life give clue to the gentle humanity of us all…little “songs” shall we say, of those moments that are held softly and secretly within our hearts, like a faded flower holding a special memory, pressed between the pages of an old novel.. Strange then, that we will share them with an anonymous machine without compunction, yet not be inclined to freely reveal such to other people…Perhaps it is that machine-like anonymity that reassures us..some people seem to have that same encouraging “feel” whereupon you can unload worries or confidences into a sensitive ear.

This, to my way of thinking is a failing of history..of our local history, where incidents and events are recorded minutely in committee records and local government archives etc…but where are the personal names?..Where are the identities that these events centered around? Who were these people who marched down the street of the town on such and such celebration day?..What was the fate of the person who’s car or buggy or person was crashed and injured in industrial accident or fall?..Who were all these people who marched through time with neither personality or history?..are we all to be slaves to opaque anonymity?..Where is the colour in the canvas .. the eyes that are the mirrors to so many souls?

I recall perusing through some archived photographs of a local town’s German school from the 1930’s. There were the usual gathering of kids ranging from around fourteen/fifteen down to seven or eight years, their beaming faces giving lie to their shoeless poverty…but then I noticed in the second row, in the shadow of one of the many Sagenschnitter brood, a dark-skinned boy of around (at a guess) ten years..I enlarged the photo on my computer and sure enough, there he was..an indigenous child ……amongst the twenty or so German kids..What was he doing there?

Fortunately his name was recorded along with all the others in handwritten script under the photo and with a degree of complicated research, I eventually found the solution to the conundrum. He was one of the Stolen Generation..placed in care as a ward of the State in 1921 from the tender age of two years for being “illegitimate”…and I learned from local sources that some indigenous children were placed in these country centres far away from their original place of birth as a “subsidy placement” (whatever that means) with suitable families. But whatever the suitability of the family who took this boy in, it was recorded that he escaped their care and eventually made his way under several different names to Mildura where he died suddenly in 1936 aged 15yrs, under suspicious circumstances from Strychnine poison. The history of this lad’s fore-shortened stay on this earth would have gone un-collated save through police and one paragraph newspaper notification and indeed, because the death was in another state from the one he was registered in, no enquiry was conducted and he would have been totally forgotten..but for this accidental notice of a different ethnicity amongst all those Germanic children..and what also of his mother and relatives in this entire sorry affair? THAT is the chance of history.

And what chance for many others, identities forgotten in the steamrolling onslaught of capitalist production, so many heaped together in congested tenements and desperate lodgings so that even in old age we become just another commodity of “cost per unit” in an aged “care” investment property portfolio? .. as has been recently aired on the ABC with the closure of the “Gatwick Hotel” and the subsequent disasters for some of the tenants who resided there.

Here is the link to a short story about this very subject by Lajos Zilahy..: But for this”.. https://ancient-sda.com/ancient/pdf_versions/but_for_this.pdf

Is this the universal fate for those without funds or favour in the wider community?..lost in the sands of time..to have any memory of their personal idiosyncratic character die along with the last one who has a direct knowledge of them at all…with perhaps nothing left on record save those “personal security identities” clinically saved on some sort of android device…a history condensed to three passwords..three little moments of one’s personal identity…a soul incomplete.

We are all humans in a humanist society .. and we should not think nor treat others as a material commodity.

              “Wanderer above a sea of fog.”

 Where I live.

I have opened a new blogger account specifically for this area where I live so as to promote stories and history placed in this locale.. https://underthemalleebough.blogspot.com/ for it is imperative to preserve what I call the “Historical watermark” that has been “impressed” upon a locale…it is such a thing that fixes and holds a place in time and allows the people living there to feel..and that is the correct emotion..”to feel” a part of that history and so identify with confidence to a place where they are living their lives…to destroy the in-situ history of a place is to debase one’s own life..It is why I feel a strange comfort whenever I descent off the higher land down into the Barossa Valley. it is because the old Germanic families and their Lutheran faith still hold control of the administration of the district and they are mostly containing any post-modern, ugliness that raises its developement head be it architectural or social, and the towns sited within that valley all have a deeply settled, rooted life of their own..You go into these towns and you can still read the Germanic names on the shops and businesses there….more power to those Germans!

The Murray Flats have a similar historical footprint, except here there is a solid mix of the original Anglo ancestry and development along the Murray River, with the Riverboat traffic and system in situ and the more Anglo-centric governance of the towns here, though the farming areas have the unmistakable influence of those hardy Germanic families still in remnant pockets….also, I have to make point of my own Italian connection to these Flats in that my Father, along with many other Italians coming earlier to the region than the post-war migration waves, were interned during the war years to cut / burn charcoal in the Blanchetown region to contribute to the war effort..and it was here that my father met my mother; of Anglo/Irish descent, a servant girl in both Punyelroo and Portee stations before/during the war…so I too have a solid connection and emotional tie to the history of the district..

As a consequence, I feel more at home here in the Murray Mallee than I did where I was born and grew up, THOSE locales now suffering from a dismantling of any recognisable cultural tie to both myself and those neighbours and friends I grew up with..the history has been lost..whereas here, there remains that emotional recognition of “where it all began” on both sides of the family..; the Italian and the Anglo heritage, plus the Aunties that married into the Germanic connections in the district…THAT is the “Historical watermark”..THAT is “the tie that binds”.

Having been a contributor of articles and aesthetics to social media for many years, culminating in being “cancelled” from several sites, and now, “deactivated” from a Twitter account because of the ghastly banality and insanity of conversations there, I can give a pretty sound analysis of the contributing faults that have given social media such a bad name these days.

The simple equation that makes a social media site “successful” is contained in the same equation that makes a particular political party successful and the tragic reality of that equation was developed and drawn upon in the last decade to elevate certain social media platforms to the giddy heights of financial mega-extreme, along with elevating certain unworthy political personages to similar heights with the use of “Cambridge Analytica” manipulation of opinion to let the likes of certain disreputable characters gain office .

It has been long known that a certain percentage of the population will always “seek the oracle and worship the idol”….in the world of social media, this is known as clustering or cabal-ing..I use the more pejorative term of :”Hem-hugging”..ie those who hide behind a metaphorical mother’s skirt to snipe out at those they disapprove of, whilst enjoying the security of being “covered” by a “mother’s wamth”..in the social media sense that being a person or persons of “authority” within the public perception or having a majority of approving “followers” that give one a touch of “cred’ by association”.

It is a cowardly, crawling method of making opinion upon those that cannot defend themselves from the onslaught of “piling-on” obsequiousness from the legion of followers crowding to also gain validation via numbers..it is the classic example of a “bullying” philosophy.

It usually starts with the culprits cautiously making an observation on a particular subject under discussion, keeping within limits of visual approbation of other’s points of order, till they suss out the particular person on the platform or blog that has a certain higher level of authority and they will then gravitate in a very short period of time to echo that authority, all the while gaining confidence through a certain level of cluster anonymity (hem-hugging) to become more assertive and accusatory of the one person under attack.

I wrote of this marvel back in 2021 after the disastrous failure of Labor to gain office in the 2019 Federal election..here (this was originally posted on one of those social media sites I was “cancelled” from);  https://freefall852.wordpress.com/2021/02/14/clustering-the-new-tool-for-electoral-success/  …The use of “Identity politics” by both the Conservatives AND the Greens recruited enough swinging voters along with the gormless “woke” left to allow the incumbent, incompetent, corrupt govt’ of the day retake office and inflict another 3 years of disaster upon the most vulnerable..

This inherent weakness in the human condition has been drawn upon throughout history, but with the electronic age and the rise of social media as not only a tool for communication, but now a weaponised instrument for mass/mob judge, jury, executioner, to use in its favour..never has such a cowardly thing been made more mainstream..We have witnessed many times the brutal use of this cudgel to beat-down, bludgeon and crush opposition of whatever shade of opinion debated, until it is now become an “influencer” in its own right of perhaps even the judiciary itself…certainly the political arm of government and perhaps now the financial arm also…for what bureaucracy or business can stand in its way?..the irony being that the mob will not balk at crushing an individual standing in its way, but seems to go-to-water if called upon to instigate mass revolution to change an entire social way of life for the better…

Curiouser and curiouser…

(Adam Miller’s Emulation of Raphael)

Transgression.

Chapter one..

“The governance of the Julian House soon taught men

in a terrible form how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel..”

*

Time wrote the contract, in collusion with Nature,

It then co-signed with a mute hand,

Caring not a jot for action or consequence,

And Mother Nature..who was She to bother the loss of one specie,

When were legion of substitutes in the great spawning,

For could not a goldfish be as valued as man in such vast universe?

But WE…WE, the industrious plunderers of the world,

We cared..for the obvious consequences of such looting,

Is the loss of future opportunity to gather harvest.

But do we honour?….Do we honour when we have so readily transgressed,

Across so many moral boundaries that hold us in unity?

Did not those two original co-conspirators; Time and Nature,

Write the rules of engagement that confine all life?

Chapter two..

“Turning the pages of history, one sees the organic, habitual behaviour

of people today in similar situations..love, jealousy, greed alike”.

*

Social, natural, physical, mental, capable, actual, menial,

Not near satisfying enough for the inquisitive eye of humanity,

Always seeking the easy way out..the easy method,

Of making life easier..but did it, does it..make life easier?

Invention upon invention..laying one thing atop another,

Each one the object to reduce the burden of work,

Cunning being the modus operandi for achieved success,

Make US the supreme animal over all others,

Take some beasts from their natural environment,

Train them to work for us, make some pet creatures,

For our own amusement, for our own vanity..

Ah!..vanity…vanity..did we not discover THAT delight,

Sooner than most other useful aberrations,

Chapter three..

“History; she too is a bible, but cannot hinder the fool from

misunderstanding her or the Devil from misquoting her…”

*

Was it the admired reflection in a shallow pool of water,

Bestowed the name of beautiful, of handsome, on one,

To become a treasure, to be admired of the tribe?

Then came the hunger for wealth to match beauty,

For the unlucky and unfortunate were not to be denied,

In equal measure of value, perhaps more so..to BUY beauty!

For wealth became an exchangeable commodity,

But would make the living of life so much harder,

For wealth need be based on the value of a rare commodity,

That would demand hard work to seek and gather.

Not for those who could weave from nature and time,

Enough to get by, enough to survive with an ease,

Allowing time enough on quiet days to make as one pleased.

Chapter four..

“The infinite depth of human compassion contends

with the infinite depth of human misery.”

*

The skills of hunting, of weaving, of making of things,

Old companions, old compatriots, old habits,

The clustering of the clan around these small wants and needs.

It was soon seen by those seeking power that such people,

Must needs be destroyed, debased, denied, false crimes contrived,

Till want, poverty, and loss of opportunity for freedom,

Herds them into the waiting trap of dependence.

It first started with taking advantage of reason,

To seek advantage rather than reason for restraint,

Want can never restrain an inquisitive eye,

That sees advantage in inventing..say; a trap that would ease,

Time in hunting the traditional way,

So more game could be gathered with less effort,

Chapter five..

“The giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper

the abyss of poverty yawned..”

*

But in doing so lose such accrued skills of the hunt,

In doing so let one person control the taking of food,

That soon morphed into one person..AND those favoured,

Taking control of means of produce, then the tribe itself,

For who are we to deny ourselves a certain luxury,

Of doing as least as possible for as high as possible reward,

Is that not the measure of personal achievement?

From the control of a trap to the trap of control,

Was but a moment in time..and time has no consideration,

For consequence..nor does Nature bother on the loss,

Of one specie when there is the great spawning.

But Nature does have rules for engagement of all species,

She has laid the blueprint for the basic foundation only,

Chapter six..

“The young fop–as with smooth chin, delicate voice, and mincing gait…

Might well have a horror of the unnatural world,

in which the sexes seemed as though they wished to change parts.”

*

There was but one clause built into the contract of life;

Reproduce in like species, in male and female conjunction.

But here it has gone astray also, turning a delight,

Of man laying with woman into a twisted perversion,

And couldn’t stop with just that one..our inquisitive eye,

Sought so many other pleasures by which to block out boredom,

For though the many gadgets that had been created,

With an inventive mind relieving the labour and the tedium,

The beast within was still fierce and wanting to be fed.

Habits, moods, desires, revulsions must be satiated,

Above all else, know we are still that ancient barbarian!

Know we are still that ferocious hunter,

Except now it is not food we stalk, nor of quarry we talk,

Chapter seven..

“As rivers glisten in different colours,

But a common sewer everywhere looks like itself…”

*

Now it is secrets, dark, dark secrets…and regrets..

For the future it is not enough to make life easier,

For the future it is turned into a game of fortune to be chased,

And with each step toward heightened pleasure become more base,

The last species to the staging-post, each one at a time we seek to erase,

Until alone with only our conscience we will convince ourselves,

We…….have won the race.

WE have transgressed beyond the boundaries of good reason,

WE..have become the quarry hunted in Time’s own good season.

Watch it!

Watch it!

Watch it!

Are you watching it?….for it is all ending.

*

[All quotes are from Theodore Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”]

Echo from love’s old song.

‘Twas a random song on the radio,

From a time of long, long ago,

Did immediately remind me of a past love,

The song ‘twas Grahame Nash; “Our House” I believe,

And did immediately evoke sadness in me,

For I did marry that past love and did build,

A house..no!..two..two houses I built for us to reside,

And with two children born within, there did abide.

For a time, one after t’other, until discontent,

Sullied our marriage, created bitter contempt.

Was her complete belief in the “New Age” cult,

Took a presence in our home, our lives, her soul,

Total control of that “philosophy” went full throttle,

And she came to worship their idols, seek the oracles,

My trade in building demanded a vision more practical,

Not for myself the chanting of folksy renditions,

Circle-dancing on the full-moon and “past-life” visions,

Nor the reliance on inane, quack patent medicines.

For the physical needs of my work demanded close attention,

And while her spirit sought the heights of aesthetic ascension,

Mine was the more practical enemy of gravitational descension.

And there was the trouble.. y’see..?

This is the modern measure, isn’t it? What’s in it for “thee”,

And where would such singular direction take “me”?

To compete between the irrational-disconnect,

Of what is too fantastical,

As against the logical, needed application,

Of what is the more likely probable.

This..was the rock on which our marriage was wrecked,

A philosophical difference with clash and wrack!

Until final measure saw divorce as an only-choice fact.

But it wasn’t just two adults ruined in that spat,

There were children, family unit, home, bank contract.

Years of build…for what makes a home is not only habitation,

Consider the mechanics of actual construction,

The physical labour, skills involved in producing,

All those comforts of life under shelter of skilled application.

Such also the evidence of ancient civilisations,

The physical remains of such applied construction.

But why they had fallen must demand our attention,

Because for most it was not conquest from enemy nation,

But rather the decay from internal desecration,

The like of being exampled in our modern relations.

Pick me a society where decay of morality,

Did not precede debasement of work-skills capacity,

Nature shows best example, but then will grant sway,

For even one slice from a cut loaf may be explained away.

Where once the detailed attention to construction wrought,

That gave sublime gravitas to philosophical thought,

Was then wasted away in corrupt, unethical, political sport.

Uniform social construct being the jointing cement,

Holding one person to another in common consent,

That with the depravity of a nation was socially rent,

Then all that work and labour, blind faith could explain,

Till there seemed little cause, no reason, the object to maintain,

So nothing was left of love’s old sweet world save the visible, crumbling remains.

Julius Kramm’s dreamtime.

“We will travel to the country, you and I,

Leaving behind the morass of the city,

Leave the dead bury the dead, say I,

Take up land in the vast, open Mallee,

Mark out foundations for a home,

And there we will start a family.

*

How many seeds are sown to the wind,

From Mallee tree and flowering vine?

As many as stars in nightime skies,

Reflecting in the river billabongs stilled,

As many as dreams in my sleeping eyes..

As many as notes from a fiddle played.

*

What dull measure is an empty life,

Devoid of any flowering children,

What be the point of working hard,

When leaving nothing but trinkets to show,

Trashy jewels can be gained by any means,

Whilst children of one’s bloodline be pure gold!

*

So let us travel together, you and I,

To take up land beyond the riverside,

Within the mallee bush we’ll abide,

There, with carpenter adze, pick and shovel,

Will we frame the structure of a house,

With pine and pug, a home we shall model.

*

It won’t be a palace, not even much,

Pug, native pine with a roof of thatch,

But it will be ours and an even match,

For the grandest residence of Kings,

Even bigger, for our court, vast forest be,

Shared with but nature’s creatures, thee, and me.

*

There, under the shelter of daeh and faeh,

Will our children be birthed, raised,

Under the shelter of the mallee canopy,

We will farm the soil to provide us plenty,

Grains and greens and pumpkins many,

Though our purse be thin, our self be healthy.

*

For my lover;

How many seeds are sown to the wind,

From Mallee tree and flowering vine?

As many as stars in night time skies,

Reflecting the produce in a garden filled,

As many as dreams in thou’s sleeping eyes..

As many as notes from a fiddle played.

*

Hymns we will sing to the glory of ages,

Songs from our lips writ by wise sages,

That beseech God of feast and famine,

Spare their humble servants glare of mammon,

Grant instead good health, long life,

Equal exchange for disdain of pelf?”

*

This was the hope, ‘twas the dream,

Writ in the hand of Julius Kramm,

Writ on the pages of a personal letter,

Found by me..his last surviving son,

All the rest, including children, dead, buried,

A whole line of them in graveyard serried.

*

I don’t think I need tell of their story,

Enough has been writ of pioneer history,

Not for nothing is this named ”Breakheart country”,

Backs, hearts, limbs and bank balances,

Still they persevered with their conviction,

Matched their draught-horses in strength and action.

*

For myself, I witnessed first-hand the grief,

When a thirteen year old boy, I played midwife,

To my mother, of my own sister, died at birth ,

Only me and my mother in house that day,

The others in the fields stooking hay,

The sudden birth making for a desperate play.

*

No, no..I’d rather not dwell if you please,

On that day, that moment ‘twill bring me to my knees,

Such a sight, for a young boy is not ready to see,

The mad panic, the fumbling, the screaming agony,

I had not the slightest idea the weight on me,

Would bear so heavy..heavy, until eternity…..

*

So, yes indeed:

How many seeds are sown to the wind,

From Mallee tree and flowering vine?

As many as stars in night time skies,

Reflecting in the river billabongs stilled,

As many as dreams in my sleeping eyes..

As many as notes from a fiddle played.

*

But not for me the sowing of a family,

For I have remained steadfastly unmarried,

The trauma of that day still too familiarly

Stinging, burning, the look of fear, then death,

‘Twould be no benefit to my health,

Nor the best for any proposed spouse.

*

Prefer to farm alone, my many acres of the Mallee,

It being the only company I trust, my family,

Under sharp skies and with astute eye,

I work the seasons and barren Earth,

Not for me the unsettling cautions of birth,

Not for me the emptiness of love lost.

*

So yes indeed:

How many seeds ARE sown to the wind,

From Mallee tree and flowering vine?

As many perchance, as the stars in nightime skies,

Reflected in lonely billabongs stilled,

As many as tears in my recollecting eyes..

As many as pious, hymn’d words at funerals played.

The passing of a Summer love.

Saw her there in the mall, me on this side her the other,

I was sitting, watching the crowd, waiting for my brother,

Saw her, but not her me..and that’s best it stay,

For it ended years ago in enmity, best let it lay.

Not that we quarrelled openly, hurtfully,

But rather, the animosity grew, a tumour on friendship.

Until it died a quiet death, did that relationship,

No dramatic outburst, more a withering on the vine,

As leaves gently fade to primrose come Autumn,

Soft falling as Vesper prayers whisp’d from a nun’s lips,

In the stulled, mulling air of cloister and dark sacrist’,

Best leave it there..

Not that I didn’t suffer a little from guilt of care,

For each of us exchanged secrets, held in trust,

That could, with careless concern, burn both of us,

But some things lost are best accepted as traded fair.

And anyway..

It was a time she suffered no greying and I..hah!..I had thicker hair.