Tomorrow being the AFL Grand Final after all

Quite nostalgic this one

Life Cycle (for Big Jim Phelan)

by Bruce Dawe

When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,
having already begun a lifetime’s barracking.

Carn, they cry, Carn … feebly at first
while parents playfully tussle with them
for possession of a rusk: Ah, he’s a little Tiger! (And they are …)

Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game
they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming
towards the daylight’s roaring empyrean

Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture,
they break surface and are forever lost,
their minds rippling out like streamers

In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice
like the voice of God booms from the stands
Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed.

Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat,
they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints
and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven,

And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team’s fortunes
– the reckless proposal after the one-point win,
the wedding and honeymoon after the grand final …

They will not grow old as those from the more northern states grow old,
for them it will always be three-quarter time
with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term,

That passion persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons,
enabling old-timers by boundary fences to dream of resurgent lions
and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present,

So that mythology may be perpetually renewed
and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god
in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing

But the dance forever the same – the elderly still
loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end,
having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation

The poet

Bruce Dawe passed away in 2020. See Vale Bruce Dawe, Australia’s ‘Poet of Suburbia’.

He has been praised for the technical achievement of blending the colloquial with the lyrical, something he often got “right”. But beyond this deftness, his poems always reach towards our most humane responses to the world.

We know from our present troubles as a nation, as a planet, and as a species, that we need poets as right and true as Bruce Dawe to continue this sometimes visionary and sometimes laughably inadequate work.

Earlier Australian Poem posts on my older blog.

2007

1. Two Australian poems of World War II – Judith Wright “The Company of Lovers” and Kenneth Slessor “Beach Burial”
2. Oh, they’re so young… Judith Wright “The Company of Lovers” again
3. Reading the Bible – Judith Wright “Bullocky”
4. New: the Friday Australian Poem: #1 — Henry Kendall 1841-1882 — “On a Baby Buried by the Hawkesbury”
5. Friday Australian poem # 2: “The Poor, Poor Country” by John Shaw Neilson
6. Friday Australian poem #3: A D Hope, “The Death of a Bird”
7. Friday Australian poem #4: Judith Wright “South of my Days” and “Woman to Child”
8. Friday Australian Poem #5: Judith Wright “For a Pastoral Family”
9. Friday Australian poem # 6: Mary Gilmore, “Nationality” and “Old Botany Bay”
10. Friday Australian poem #7: Henry Lawson “Faces in the Street”
11. Friday Australian poem #8: Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) “Five Bells”
12. Friday Australian poem #9: Charles Harpur (1813 – 1868) “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”
13. Friday Australian poem #10: John O’Brien “The Old Bush School”
14. Friday Australian poem #11: “Because” by James McAuley
15. Friday Australian poem #12: David Campbell “Men in Green”
16. Friday Australian poem #12a: not a poem! Follows up on #12.
17. Friday Australian poem # 14: “The Australaise” by C J Dennis
18. Friday Australian poem #15: Les Murray, “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow”
19. Friday Australian poem #16: Banjo Paterson “Fur and Feathers”
20. Friday Australian poem #17: Bruce Dawe, “Homecoming”
21. Friday Australian poem #18: A B Paterson “The Geebung Polo Club”
22. Friday Australian poem #19: Vance Palmer (1885-1959) “The Farmer Remembers the Somme”

2008

1. Australian poem: 2008 series: #1 — Marian Spires “War on Language” (2003)
2. Australian poem: 2008 series: #2 — Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) “Snowdrops”
3. Australian poem: 2008 series #3 — anon. “Botany Bay”
4. Australian Poem: 2008 series #4 and #5 — two for the price of one: Paul Buttigieg “Black Bastards” and Eric Bogle “Now I’m Easy”
5. Australian Poem: 2008 series #6 — Henry Kendall “The Last of his Tribe”
6. Australian poem: 2008 series #7 — Melinda Kendall “Lost in the Bush” and “Fairy Meadow”
7. Australian poem: 2008 series #8 — Indigenous poetry
8. Australian poem: 2008 series #9 — A B Paterson “The Angel’s Kiss”
9. Australian poem 2008 series #10: Peter Skrzynecki “Summer in the Country” (2005)
10. Australian poem 2008 series #11 — George Essex Evans “To a Bigot”
11. Australian poem 2008 series #12 — Judith Wright recycled for Anzac Day
12. Australian poem 2008 series #13 — Roland Robinson (1912-1992) “The Drovers”
13. Australian poem 2008 series #14 — Rosemary Dobson (1920 – ) “A Fine Thing”
14. Australian poem 2008 series #15 — John Shaw Neilson “The Orange Tree”
15. Australian poem 2008 series # 16: cheating slightly… Bai Ju Yi “On West Lake” – Translated 1994 by N J Whitfield and M Q Xu
16. Australian poem 2008 series #17: “Australia” — A D Hope
17. Australian poem 2008 series #18: YouTube – Poetry Clip: Robert Gray “A Bowl of Pears”
18. Australian poem 2008 series #19: You Don’t Get Me — Lachlan Irvine “The Thousand Yard Stare”
19. Australian poem 2008 series #20: “Middleton’s Rouseabout” — Henry Lawson (1896)
20. Australian poem 2008 series #21: Adam Aitken “Louis De Carne’s Diary”
21. Australian poem 2008 series #22: Kenneth Mackay OBE “The Song that Men Should Sing” (1899)
22. Australian poem 2008 series #23: George Essex Evans “The Women of the West”