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.

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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.

Stanley River

Tags

Australian bush poetry, Australian traditional poetry, bush poet, Bush Poetry, poem, poetry, Stanley River Queensland

The water rippling o’er the bars whispers these words to me:
“You came and swam in my cool depths when you were young and free.

Then all your worries were so small and how the world was wide;
But now the world has wearied you, come here, a while abide.

For I have waited patiently while you were far away,
And deep within my heart I knew that you’d return one day.

Your step is slower than before, for many years have passed,
And you have aged, as too have I, but I still flow as fast.

Come rest your body and your soul here by my crystal pools,
Where long ago, my glistening rocks, to you were precious jewels.”

Drought & Flood

Tags

Australian poet, Australian traditional poetry, Bush Poetry, drought, Flood, Formal poetry, poem, poetry, sonnet, Spenserian sonnet

Drought

The paddocks bake to brown in summer heat.
The river shrinks to holes where lungfish dwell.
The grass remaining cracks beneath one’s feet.
The water level drops deep in the well,
And everywhere is death, and death the smell,
For scattered on the ground the rotting dead.
A blasted vision of an earthly hell,
Where walk the living with their limbs like lead,
Beneath a sky bloodshot at dusk with red.
The wind stirs dust; the tree limbs crack and fall.
The ants and maggots thrive – they are well-fed.
A crow upon a carcass sounds its call.
The land is dying – drying is its blood;
Its thirst will not be quenched – until the flood.

Flood

The land has languished in the drought’s foul grip,
But now the clouds roll in and soon the rain
Falls lightly, and the downpipes start to drip.
Then steadier, like an approaching train
it’s heavier, that welcome sweet refrain
As gutters gurgle and tanks overflow,
And raindrops drum against the window pane.
The rain turns to torrential – warm winds blow.
The fresh creeps higher in the stream below.
The river’s banks are broken, comes the flood.
Across the flats the surging waters flow
To wash away drought’s sacrificial blood.
The gods appeased – the cycle is complete.
Now throbs the land once more to its slow beat.

Whirlpools

Tags

Australian poet, Black Holes, Galaxies, limerick, Limerick poem, Limerick poetry, poem, poetry, Whirlpool

Whirlpool

The suns and the planets they roll,
As all matter is sucked to the goal.
And to black fades the light,
As it loses the fight
With the galaxy’s massive black hole.

Whirlpool 2

I once spied a paddling of ducks
Rotating upon a conflux.
I called out to them: “Fly!
Escape now or you’ll die!”
They said: “Try as we might, this thing sucks.”