Category Archives: LoSoRhyMo

November verses 13 and 14

Posted on 30 November 2023 | 1 comment

My last two stanzas for this year are a Terminal, which I believe is something developed by the late John Tranter. The last word in each line is the corresponding word in two stanzas taken pretty much at random (Chapter 4, verses 30 and 31, if you’re interested) from Babette Deutsch’s 1943 translation of Eugene Onegin, which is online at Internet Archive. I think they make a kind of sense.

Verses 13 & 14: Religion
Hell was terrifying. Hades, 
though a similar abode,
was not too rude for talk with ladies
even in a jokey mode.
Ancient gods just decorated 
what we knew had been created
by our one true God. The pen
was weaker than the Word. Amen! 
Now neither Zeus nor Yahweh win me
over. I just don’t inscribe
them on my heart. No diatribe
from either sounds alarms within me.
No need to be satirical
nor offer hymn or madrigal.

Yet I’ve been faithful in my fashion.
I don’t fear hell now, not a bit,
but David’s psalms and Matthew’s Passion,
Priam’s grief and Dante’s wit
speak to me of things that matter.
Life without them would be flatter. 
As sunlight sets fine jewels aglow
and wine makes conversation flow, 
these ancient tales hold my affection. 
I know I've no immortal soul, 
that death is death, and lives will roll
their course. Each adds to the collection:
wisdom, folly, grace. Update: 
no gods, no providence, no fate.

Normal blogging will resume shortly.

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November verse 12

Posted on 28 November 2023 | 1 comment

Even though the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story on their website about the weekend’s Rising Tide blockade, it has maintained its silence in the print edition, except for a letter from Cathering Rossiter, of Fadden.

Verse 12: Newspaper of record?
(after the Sydney Morning Herald 
print edition, 28 November 2023)

In other news, a mass extinction
threatens unless something's done
to stop all fossil fuel extraction.
Letter on page twenty-one
thanks the thousands who blockaded 
Port Newcastle (paddled, waded,
were arrested, took a stand),
but that's the lot, the story's canned. 
A riot would have been reported,
violent death would make page one,
Pezzullo, Lehrmann, courtroom fun.
But thirty hours, no coal exported:
silence. Are they clowns or cads?
Wel, fossil fuellers run big ads*.

* See SMH, 27 November, page 9

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November verse 11

Posted on 26 November 2023 | Leave a comment

I’ve been a bit busy, and will struggle to reach my quota of 14 stanzas this month. Here’s a what-I-did-on-the-weekend verse. 

Verse 11: The Rising Tide blockade of Newcastle coal port
With face paint, dolphins, rain and thunder,
unicorn and sousaphone,
for thirty hours, a joyful wonder,
kayaks shut the coal port down. 
Face to face with climate evil,
disobedience was civil.
Some as clowns or pirates dressed
a hundred brave souls faced arrest,
while hundreds on the shore were chanting,
'No more coal, no more oil,
keep that carbon in the soil.'
Drumming, singing, waving, dancing:
'Stop the coal, stop the ships,
we say no apocalypse.'

Added Monday morning: Shockingly, today’s Sydney Morning Herald makes no mention of this huge act of civil disobedience. It carries a huge ad for ‘oil and gas giant’ Woodside.

Added Tuesday morning: The Sydney Morning Herald did run a piece on the blockade, dated 7.31 yesterday morning, so too late for Monday’s newspaper. It’s mentioned in the ‘In other news’ section of their morning email. You can read it here.

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November verse 10

Posted on 23 November 2023 | 2 comments

I don’t think this one needs any explanation.

10. Webinar
We used to meet, shake hands, rub shoulders,
curse the traffic, kiss a cheek,
queue for name tags, bags and folders, 
find a chair that didn’t squeak.
Now it’s all, ‘You’re not unmuted,’
‘Can the speaker be spotlighted?’
‘Check the webpage in the chat,’
‘Share a screen – Oh look, a cat!’
To meet up now, we all go zooming:
names attached, we fill our screens
with gallery view, and by this means
we see a score of 2-D humans.
Minds still meet, and even hearts,
but what of one another's farts?

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November verse 9: From Debra Dank

Posted on 21 November 2023 | 2 comments

I’ve just read Debra Dank’s We Come with this Place, an astonishing book that I expect to blog about soon. It won four of the prizes at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards this year: you can read the judges’ comments here and here.

Today’s stanza is a versification of the first paragraph of the chapter ‘Yarned into Place’. It’s probably useful to say that the red dust of Gudanji Country is a powerful presence throughout the book.

Verse 9: From Debra Dank
'Nyamirniji ilinga jaburru' 
'You listen first and then you'll know.' 
The road ahead lies straight and narrow,
dictates where our car will go.
A line dug in the land by grader,
straight as pencil-rule on paper,
irons out what that land has lived
and seen: a scar. We'd be deceived
but there behind us all the swirling
waves and billows of red dust
erase that line, as breezes must,
defy geometry’s appalling
power. No straight line. All around
dust hides what hides the sacred ground.

Here’s the original prose, from page 239 of the book:

‘Nyamirniji ilinga jaburru,’ she said. ‘You listen first and then you will know.’ The road stretched ahead, an astonishing river of earth that we, travelling in a white troopie, moved along as if in a boat. As far ahead as we could see, the road continued straight. Someone had taken out a grader and dug a straight line across the landscape as easily as they would have used a ruler to draw a line on a paper map. And they built that road, so straight and flat that it ironed out all the history this country had lived and seen, leaving just that awful scarring mark. But, when we looked behind us, swirling and billowing waves of red dust obliterated the road, twisting and turning in eddies and breezes. There was not a straight line to be found anywhere.

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November verse 8: Dum diversas

Posted on 20 November 2023 | 3 comments

I’m not sure that my little stanzas ca address truly horrible things. It’s almost a kind of blasphemy to tie up great, tragic events and concepts into a neat little rhyming package. But one of my aims in these November stanzas is to grab whatever is occupying my mind a the time and wrangle it into verse.

This issue may not be as urgently of the moment as some, but I learned some time ago that the English invaders of Australia in the late 1700s didn’t invoke the doctrine of terra nullius as justification. For at least the first fifty years of settlement, no one pretended that there was anything other than a war of occupation and resistance. Courts and governments only started talking about terra nulliius in the 1860s or later.* The moral / legal justification, if there was any, dated back to the Doctrine of Discovery, which was understood to have originated in a series of papal bulls in the 1400s. The Doctrine of Discovery has been repudiated by Pope Francis but the bulls have not been rescinded.

The first of the papal bulls, Dum diversas, was issued by Pope Nicolas V in 1452, addressed to King Alfonse of Portugal. If you have the stomach for it, you can read an English translation here. Here’s my short, rhyming version of the ghastly gist:

Verse 8: Dum Diversas
Divine Love is what animates us,
faith for which Christ shed his blood.
We must protect from all that hates us
all our flock, from lamb to stud, 
and so we grant you full, free power
wherever Christ's love does not flower:
invade, fight, conquer, subjugate,
take land, enslave, appropriate,
enrich yourselves, no mercy ever, 
leave no stone upon a stone,
destroy, heap blood-stained bone on bone.
And all who help in this endeavour,
should they die, to lose or win,
their souls shall be absolved of sin.

* I am not a historian. Please correct me in the comments if I need correcting.

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November verse 7

Posted on 16 November 2023 | 1 comment 
7. On reading Burglar Bill for something 
like the thousandth time
Everything he owned was stolen:
bed, beans, teapot, teacup, tea,
the grate he heaped his stolen coal in,
helmet, handsaw, got for free
on his nightly torchlit outing,
in at windows, gaily shouting,
'That's a nice –––, I'll have that!'
(A question: Did he steal his cat?)
Then along came Burglar Betty: 
being burgled isn't fun.
Betty's baby (daughter? son?)
turned them both from crime and yet he
now – a timid reader prays – 
recalls with joy his wicked days.

If you’ve never read Burglar Bill, by Janet and Allen Ahlberg, you’ve got a treat in store. I probably haven’t actually read it a thousand times, but these days I can be asked to read it three times in a row. Like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are or Margaret Mahy’s A Lion in the Meadow, it never gets boring.

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November verse 6

Posted on 14 November 2023 | 1 comment 
6. On the Belvoir Street Theatre production of
Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

Pontius Pilate chats with Jesus
Satan's crew puts on a show
of magic that astounds and pleases.
Heads are torn off – it's Moscow
in Stalin's time, plus naked witches,
lots of bodies without britches.
One leaps out into the street
bold as brass but less discreet.
'The worst sin is to be a coward.'
The man who wrote this rampant tale
risked more than just a night in gaol.
A message for us all post-Howard:
be bold, have fun, don't hesitate, 
and if you write poems they don't have to rhyme or scan.

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November verse 4

Posted on 8 November 2023 | 2 comments

Today, instead of a rhyming stanza, here’s a list puzzle poem, which I couldn’t bear to keep to 14 lines:

4. A long way from the loneliest
Beatles song
Adam Driver movie
Route
Holmium
Paris
Sexy
End of the span
Lutetium
Maidens in paradise
Prime
Tungsten
Rhenium
Trombones
Sunset Strip
Mardi Gras

Added later: I’ve been told that as a puzzle this is just too hard. If you highlight the sentence after the next full stop, you will see a clue. Think numbers: One is the loneliest number. Big things happened in Paris ’68 etcetera. Lutetium is number 71 on the periodic table of elements. .

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November verse 3

Posted on 7 November 2023 | 3 comments

Today my body cried out for a verse of lamentation:

3. Coughin'
Ask how I am, and I'll say, Better
than I was, but hardly well.
My voice is rough, I hawk and splutter – 
so much sputum to expel.
A punchline pun my dad told often:
'Someone stop this bloody coffin!'
Prostate cancer saw him off,
not his endless smoker's cough.
I'm two years older than he lasted.
Minds my age see lack of breath
as one more harbinger of death,
but I know this is just a blasted,
blooming virus that's a pain –
I'll soon be tissue-free again.

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