Sunset in Winter

Tags

Australian bush poetry, Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, Formal poetry, poem, poetry, sunset

Sunset in Winter

The amber glow as day begins to die,
Behind a darkened hill that lies to west,
Where trees that silhouette against the sky
March on like lines of soldiers on its crest.

And where the amber meets the fading blue,
And tinges it with golden streaming light,
With painted colours these last rays imbue
The western sky, before the fall of night.

Advertisements

Quest

Tags

Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, Bird with no feet sleeps on the wind, Days of being wild movie, Formal poetry, Orpheus Descending, poem, poetry, Song lyrics, Tennessee Williams, The bird with no feet

Quest

There’s a bird with no feet – only wings,
And it sleeps on the wind, and it sings
All day long as it travels the skies,
And it lands only once – when it dies.

{I first came across “The bird with no feet” theme
in an obscure Chinese movie “Days of Being Wild”.
I believe it comes from the Tennessee Williams play “Orpheus Descending”,
but I think its origin may be much older.
I wrote this little poem after watching the Chinese movie.}

Frank Slide

Tags

Alberta, Australian poet, Canada, Canadian Rockies, Crowsnest Pass, Formal poetry, Frank Slide, Frank Slide poem, poem, poetry, Spenserian sonnet, Turtle Mountain

Don’t make your camp beneath its towering peaks.
So said the ancient ones – the mountain moans.
Sometimes it moves, sometimes it loudly speaks
Of grinding pain within its brittle bones.
And when it shivers it shakes loose the stones,
And down its furrowed flanks they swiftly roll.
Yet brave men turned a deaf ear to its groans,
And rushed to mine its gleaming seams of coal.
But Nature’s force no mortal men control,
And deep within – the mountain’s rocky heart
It broke, and terrible would be the toll;
For with a roar the east face fell apart.
And many who on that grey morning died,
Still sleep beneath the rubble of Frank Slide.

Frank Slide

Trace

Tags

Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, death, Formal poetry, Ghosts, poem, poetry, Shades

The creaking of his empty chair.
In dead of night, a muffled moan.
A faint footfall upon the stair.

And though I know he’s cold as stone,
And too, I know there’s no one there,
These sounds I hear when we’re alone.

Rebound!

Tags

Australian poet, big bang, Big Bang Theory, Eternal Recurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzschean philosophy, poem, poetry, Rebounding Universe, sonnet, Spenserian sonnet

Big Bang to Crunch – a singularity
It is once more. How many billion years
Have passed? Now but a point, but can it be
A point? – time stops, and space it disappears,
As physics’ laws break down and matter smears
Deep in this place that holds the galaxies
Compressed. Gone for an instant, reappears
The light – as bang! – the tortured matter flees
Its cell – exploding like a swarm of bees
Released from the confinement of their hive.
And what or who, in that split second frees
The future stars and suns, men still will strive
To know, here on this obscure planet Earth –
What force drives life, and death, and then….rebirth?

Corn

Tags

Australian bush poetry, Australian traditional poetry, Bush Poetry, corn, Dairy farming in Queensland, maize, poem, poetry

Corn was a crop that each spring we would sow,
And in the autumn pick and bag each row.
Hard work it was, but then we didn’t mind;
We’d fill the shed with all that it could hold;
The cobs we’d husk and to a fine meal grind,
To feed the milkers through the winter cold.

But on reflection now I shake my head;
My father, bless his soul, is now long dead.
By sixty he was bent, his body worn,
From all that grinding toil and sweat and pain.
Now he is gone and so too is the corn,
And houses stand where once were fields of grain.

Crunch!

Tags

Australian poet, Dark matter, Heat Death of the Universe, poem, poetry, Singularity, sonnet, Spenserian sonnet, The Big Crunch

So comes the end – expansion ceases now;
All heat has died; all matter is stone cold.
It’s reached as far as its laws will allow;
Now gravity, attractive force, takes hold.
For what seemed an eternity it rolled
Forever outward – now it is reversed.
For all things must return, when they are old,
To where they once began – so all are cursed.
From just a speck it into being burst;
Now to that point its body must return.
To that elusive place before the first
Fraction of time and space, now it must turn
And race – all matter, stuff of stars, to there
Must hurtle – every atom, to nowhere.

Bang!

Tags

Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, Big Bang Theory, Creation of the Universe, Formal poetry, poem, poetry, Singularity, sonnet, Universe

It starts – the birth of matter, time and space,
As silently, expanding gases roar.
Towards a far infinity they race.
From just a speck, a tiny point, they pour
White hot – the cosmic building blocks, the raw
Materials that swirl and then condense
To blazing suns and planets. And from core
To crust, each body, tiny or immense,
Each boiling ball of rock or gas so dense –
All came, each one, from just a single place;
From there they came, or nowhere, in a sense;
Yet now these wonders would the Heavens grace.
The Universe was made in such a way,
And too, its laws – and these it must obey.

Quarks 101

Tags

Atomic theory, Australian poet, Fundamental particles, Nuclear physics, poem, poetry, quarks

They’re fundamental particles
Described in complex articles.
They have six flavours which is strange;
They form a hadron when arranged.
The ups and downs are very light
But stable and a common sight,
Could we but see them, for we’re blind
To quarks – by colour they’re confined.
The others are the strange and charmed,
(In writing this no quarks were harmed.)
And top and bottom are the last,
With these four changing very fast
To ups and downs by their decays,
For they were made by cosmic rays.
They have two charges, mass, and spin,
And there is broad agreement in
Each published scientific source
That every quark feels every force.
As each quark has an anti-mate,
What if they meet? What is their fate?
If you are just a cloud of quarks,
Could you end in a shower of sparks?

Discarded Gods

Tags

Ancient Greece, Australian poet, Greek Gods and Godesses, Greek Mythology, Mount Olympus, Petrarchan sonnet, poem, poetry, sonnet

On high Olympus Zeus waters his plants.
His garden blooms; he blows away the snow.
Apollo’s firing arrows from his bow,
As Hera, washing done, hangs out her pants.
Poseidon, Shaker of the Earth, just rants;
He can’t get used to life laid-back and slow.
He longs to plunge into the sea below,
And knows that one fine day he’ll get the chance.
Hung-over, Dionysus grunts and groans,
While Hestia, hearth bound, clears out cold ash.
Vain Aphrodite puts her makeup on,
While razor-sharp, his spear-tip, Ares hones.
The smith Hephaestus gives hot bronze a bash.
They’re out of fashion – but they haven’t gone.

Oh no, they haven’t left the mountain top.
Up on those cloudy heights they still reside;
Wait patiently for what The Fates decide.
On fertile slopes, grows high, Demeter’s crop;
The heavy heads of grain she soon will lop.
And Hermes, fleet of foot, still travels wide;
As exercise, the god won’t be denied.
Athena, helping Hera, wields a mop,
As Artemis heads off to hunt for deer;
Her quiver and her bow across her back.
Hephaestus is still making lots of noise,
And Dionysus downs another beer.
Zeus gazes down on Greece, gone to the pack,
And smiles at the obtuseness of his toys.