We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

17.6.25

The Secret Truth of Old Age

 

I’m very occupied.

Honestly.


How?

Telling that 

needs greater honesty.


Almost unknown to myself

I decided:


The time left – mine! –

I choose to use

indulgently.


Once

I did the needful things.


Now I laze about,

reading, eating …

occupied in selfish pleasure


if I’m honest.




Written for dVerse Quadrille #226 – Honestly!


(A dVerse invention, the Quadrille must be exactly 44 words, excluding title, and must include one specific word – in this case, 'honest'.)



12.6.25

The View from Here


I walk out my door

and look straight across at mountains

jutting behind the houses over the road.


Really, they loom

on the other side of our town, and beyond

paddocks and canefields, trees and river.


But this hill I’m on, 

up the top here, takes my sight leaping

past the valley to the craggy range 


(the Border Ranges)

filling the width of my vision, which rises

to encompass also the height of the sky.


‘The bright of the sky’

my hand types, and I nearly keep that.

At present it’s clear, cold winter-bright.


The mountain edge 

is sharp, as if carved with a knife. 

Below is a row of trees topping the hill.


Somewhere else

the globe is warming, ice caps melt,

the ocean is filling with plastic.


Some other time,

not now, the rivers fill too full 

drowning the land; or forests burn.


For a moment I forget 

the horrors of wars, starvation, pestilence.

They will return too soon.  Meanwhile


I open my door.

I gaze at the mountains opposite, deepest blue. 

(I dribble a little, being old. It doesn’t matter.)














Written for Poetics: A View of One's Own, at dVerse.


30.4.25

Write Me a Letter …


Piercing unaccompanied voice.

A sad-faced man in close-up

in a movie seen on TV, some years 

after it was made. And after I'd learned, 

close up, what ‘Stir Crazy’ could mean.


Send it by mail … And we did.

All the letters eventually burned, 

but I can still quote them … still 

hear your voice in my head. Speaking, 

not singing. Lifting off the page.


Put your arms ’round me,

give my heart ease. Something 

to dream of, if you’d been free.

Roses love sunshine. You wrote me 

poems full of roses: and in one letter


a small pressed flower, called

hearts-ease. A half-joking scrawl

in the margin, ‘Well, I din’t ’ave

no roses.’ Angels in heaven

know I love you.  All my life long,


any time, without warning,

a sweet-sounding folksong – 

plaintive, haunting – in that movie clip, 

or in the voice of Burl Ives, or 

Glenn Campbell, or Johnny Cash … 


or your voice, or mine. Plunging me 

instantly, again, down in the valley,

the valley so low. Where a dead man 

waits in remembrance. (Send it 

in care of the Birmingham Jail.)



NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Thirty


It surprised me that my final poem this April would turn out to be this. I guess something still needed expression. The back story is in my memoir Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of Darkness and Light, published in paperback 2023 and available from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. To be made available on Amazon as an ebook in 2025.


(This video from the movie begins with the end of another song before going into 'Down in the Valley'):