No bush poem

Today, I have resigned from the challenge of bush poetry: sick of imagining I can see where the beats fall and no real yarns to draw on… but I present what I have done today because I don’t want to feel like I missed a day. The two forms is a bit indulgent, but the electrons are virtually free.

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No bush poem

Urban male in a cafe
Ponders his affiliation
Is Australia in his way
Just by being in this nation?

Blessed with uncles on the land
Raising sheep and wheat and children
Found rich lessons came to hand
When he travelled out of Melbourne

Slaughtered sheep in gloomy shed
Uncle showing kids where meat’s from
Holds heart beating pulsing red
Delights young and squealing threesome

Split his teenage head right open
Bled bright red on the orange track
Playing in a dormant field bin
Stitched up his chin and up the back

Datsun speeds through a paddock
Skidding, sliding, learner driving
Brush with gate post not emphatic
Dented panel, all surviving

Spotlight! utes chasing bunnies
Guns and clubs and eager chases
Later asked what the fun is?
Shown moral questions he faces…

[quits]

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Notes on Australia Day

Reminiscence / Cosmopolitan urbanised man looking for nation / Blessed with uncles’ farms / Bloated sheep carcass / A slaughter and a beating heart / Tearing up paddocks in a lemon 120Y. Self-directed advanced driving courses. Hitting fence posts / Split head open racing down a field bin. Not calling Grandma for help / The fun of spotlighting doused by a sensitive father’s accounts of animal cruelty / You Yangs BBQ: blackened jacket potatoes in coals with margarine; sausages and forequarter chops with sauce / Impromptu Korean BBQ in the rain at Puffing Billy / Clambering over granite boulders/ Summers at the beach. Swimming. Fishing. A sunburnt generation / Christmas in a tent / The tropical north is slow / Forty minute bus ride to school in a town of football worshippers, from a mid-point town with more horses than men and a goat mowing the lawn next-door.

//ends

>> month of poetry 2012