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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...



I still have the robot on the job.

Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

And here is a poem:

Soliloquy for One Dead

Bruce Dawe

Ah, no, Joe, you never knew
the whole of it, the whistling
which is only the wind in the chimney's
smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy
path that are always somebody else's.
I think of your limbs down there, softly
becoming mineral, the life of grasses,
and the old love of you thrusts the tears
up into my eyes, with the family aware
and looking everywhere else.
Sometimes when summer is over the land,
when the heat quickens the deaf timbers,
and birds are thick in the plumbs again,
my heart sickens, Joe, calling
for the water of your voice and the gone
agony of your nearness. I try hard
to forget, saying: If God wills,
it must be so, because of
His goodness, because-
but the grasshopper memory leaps
in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe,
you never knew the whole of it...

I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Australian poet. Well, it's down to him or Kenneth Slessor anyway.

Comments

Louis la Vache said…
Excellent capture of the reflection in the water!
Julie said…
Yes, I like Dawe. This one has some particularly piercing language of loss. I think it may be his essential Australianness that I respond to. "When first the land was ours" is particularly apt at the moment - if you can come to terms with the rhyming which makes me self-conscious when reading it. Respond quite well to Robert Gray, too.
freefalling said…
I bet you I can tell you something about Bruce Dawe you never knew.
He eats garlic sandwiches for lunch.
Bread, butter and sliced up garlic -m,mmmm.
I went to school with his kids.
They were an odd family.
And he was a lecturer/professor at my uni (DDIAE/USQ).
Do you feel more informed now?!
Julie said…
Well, I for one certainly needed to know that!

Can you nominate a family that is even?
Kris McCracken said…
FF, I do feel more informed. I could eat garlic sandwiches, but it would make meetings a bit harder.

I never like meeting authors I enjoy, the few that I have met have always struck me as tossers!

Oddly, a couple whose work I have little time for, I've quite liked as people.

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