At A Funeral - Dennis Brutus

Black, green and gold at sunset: pageantry

And stubbled graves: expectant, of eternity,
In brides-white, nuns-white veils the nurses gush their bounty
Of red-wine cloaks, frothing the bugled dirging slopes
Salute! Then ponder all this hollow panoply
For one whose gifts the mud devours, with our hopes.

Oh all you frustrate ones, powers tombed in dirt,

Aborted, not by Death but carrion books of birth
Arise! The brassy shout of Freedom stirs our earth;
Not Death but deaths-head tyranny scythes our ground
And plots our narrow cells of pain defeat and dearth:
Better that we should die, than that we should lie down

If This Life Is All We Have

by Dennis Brutus

IF this life is all we have

if in fact it is all we shall know
as indeed may be most probable
and if, as is reasonably certain
we shall have no more on earth
then it is wrong to lament
wrong to wish for the end of life
wrong to feel one must drag somehow through
and surely one must do whatever one can
fill each day with as much as can be done
while we live, we must fill each day with living
and do each day as much as we can
of what seems to us worthwhile;
all that is good, as we understand it
all that stirs us with a sense of joy
and this we must do each day as much as we can
while we are living
since this may be the only life
and certainly the only one we shall know here
it is sensible to make it full and alive
and rich and satisfying
and filled with all that seems good to us good,
and that seems enduring and brings joy
all that seems virtuous
all that seems alive

Africa

Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veinss
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent
This back that never breaks under the weight of humilation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty

The Vultures

In that time
When civilization struck with insults
When holy water struck domesticated brows
The vultures built in the shadow of their claws
The bloody monument of the tutelary era
In that time
Laughter gasped its last in the metallic hell of roads
And the monotonous rhythm of Paternosters
Covered the groans on plantations run for profit
O sour memory of extorted kisses
Promises mutilated by machine-gun blasts
Strange men who were not men
You knew all the books you did not know love
Or the hands that fertilize the womb of the earth
The roots of our hands deep as revolt
Despite your hymns of pride among boneyards
Villages laid waste and Africa dismembered
Hope lived in us like a citadel
And from the mines of Swaziland to the heavy sweat of Europes factories
Spring will put on flesh under our steps of light

Piano and Drums -Gabriel Okara

When at break of day at a riverside

I hear the jungle drums telegraphing
the mystic rhythm, urgent, raw
like bleeding flesh, speaking of
primal youth and the beginning
I see the panther ready to pounce
the leopard snarling about to leap
and the hunters crouch with spears poised;
And my blood ripples, turns torrent,
topples the years and at once Im
in my mothers laps a suckling;
at once Im walking simple
paths with no innovations,
rugged, fashioned with the naked
warmth of hurrying feet and groping hearts
in green leaves and wild flowers pulsing.

Then I hear a wailing piano

solo speaking of complex ways in
tear-furrowed concerto;
of far away lands
and new horizons with
coaxing diminuendo, counterpoint,
crescendo. But lost in the labyrinth
of its complexities, it ends in the middle
of a phrase at a daggerpoint.

And I lost in the morning mist

of an age at a riverside keep
wandering in the mystic rhythm
of jungle drums and the concerto.

The Call of the River Nun

I hear your call!

I hear it far away;
I hear it break the circle of these crouching hills.

I want to view your face again and feel your cold embrace;
or at your brim to set myself and inhale your breath;
or like the trees, to watch my mirrored self unfold and span my days with song
from the lips
of dawn.

I hear your lapping call!

I hear it coming through; invoking the ghost of a child listening, where river birds
hail your
silver-surfaced flow.
My rivers calling too!

Its ceaseless flow impels my foundring canoe down its inevitable course.
And each dying year brings near the sea-bird call, the final call that stills the
crested waves and breaks in two the curtain of silence of my upturned canoe.
O incomprehensible God!
Shall my pilot be my inborn stars to that final call to Thee.
O my rivers complex course?

The Lonely Land

A. J. M. Smith

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
and cloud-piled sky;
and in the bay
blown spume and windrift
and thin, bitter spray
snap
at the whirling sky;
and the pine trees
lean one way.

A wild duck calls

to her mate,
and the ragged
and passionate tones
stagger and fall,
and recover,
and stagger and fall,
on these stones
are lost
in the lapping of water
on smooth, flat stones.

This is a beauty
of dissonance,
this resonance
of stony strand,
this smoky cry
curled over a black pine
like a broken
and wind-battered branch
when the wind
bends the tops of the pines
and curdles the sky
from the north.

This is the beauty

of strength
broken by strength
and still strong.

Woman To Man- Judith Wright

The eyeless labourer in the night,

the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day---
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

This is no child with a child's face;

this has no name to name it by;
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.
This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

This is the maker and the made;

this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light along the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

Australia
by A. D. Hope

A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey

In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

sIn them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: we live but we survive,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

And her five cities, like five teeming sores,

Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home

From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare

Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.

A Far Cry from Africa Derek Walcott, 1930

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt

Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
Waste no compassion on these separate dead!
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break

In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

Mass Man

Through a great lion's head clouded by mange

a black clerk growls.
Next, a gold wired peacock withholds a man,
a fan, flaunting its ovalled jeweled eyes;
What metaphors!
What coruscating, mincing fantasies!

Hector Mannix, water works clerk, San Juan, has entered a lion.
Boysie, two golden mangoes, bobbing for breastplates, barges
like Cleopatra down her river, making style.
"Join us," they shout, "O God, child, you can't dance?"
But somewhere in that whirlwind's radiance
a child, rigged like a bat, collapses, sobbing.

But I am dancing, look, from an old gibbet

my bull-whipped body swings, a metronome!
Like a fruit-bat dropped in the silk-cotton's shade,
my mania, my mania is a terrible calm.

Upon your penitential morning,

some skull must rub its memory with ashes,
some mind must squat down howling in your dust,
some hand must crawl and recollect your rubbish,
someone must write your poems.

The story of this exchange of verses is rather complex. In 1956 James McAuley,
then about to launch a new literary magazine, Quadrant, wrote and asked me for
a contribution for his first number. He suggested something on the discursive
mode in poetry. As it happened he had hit on an idea I was already
contemplatingonly as the theme of a poem rather than as an article. The poem
would never have been finished in time, so it was turned into a prose article:
The Discursive Mode, Reflections on the Ecology of Poetry, which was later
republished in a revised form in The Cave and the Spring, a set of essays on
poetry which came out in 1965. It was here apparently that my friend Judith
Wright picked it up and was inspired to write the reply which she has allowed me
to reprint here. The argument of The Discursive Mode was that the forms of
poetry are related to one another, in fact form an ecology comparable to that
exhibited by the world of plants, and that just as indiscriminate felling of forests
may lead to erosion and a desert ecology, so the disappearance of the great
forms of poetry, such as the epic, in the last two hundred years has led to a
desert ecology of poetry in which only small stunted forms like the personal
ejaculation or, that monstrosity of our time, the free-verse lyric survive. I
suggested at the end of the essay that to restore the eroded landscape a revival
of hardy and courageous verse satire might be efficacious as a first step.

Now this is conservation talk, and Judith is not only one of the best poets in the
country but its leading conservationist. In that same year I was living on the
Greek island of Hydra when the editor of the literary page of the Sydney Morning
Herald sent me a copy of Judith's poem and asked if I would care to reply in kind.
At first I thought: No, I never reply to criticism, and then I thought: But I would
always reply to Judith! Hence the lines that follow.

TO A.D. Hope

Poetry's forests are all felled,

its trees can sink no roots, you say.
By neither root nor fallow held
the heart's earth dries and blows away.
Its sand and rock and clay lie bare.

Plan then to rehabilitate.

We've made a desert: obviously
we must confirm this altered state
and make a new ecology
with thorn-bush and with prickly pear.

Import the cactus and the aloe,

mark out these sands with ordered stakes.
A desert fauna soon will follow
Of scorpions, rats and tiger-snakes
O what a garden will be there.

Then after patient centuries

comes the glad era: Desert Man
will wake to find the forest's trees
returned, the world restored by plan,
The Cave and Spring as once they were?

No: let's consult authorities

before importing any pest.
They've worked on problems such as these
and know what suits our climate best.
To ask them would be wise and fair.

The Workers answer from the field:

Use willing small low-growing things
the evening-primrose seeding wild,
The faithful grass that spreads and springs
And drinks the dew and needs no care.

To Judith Wright
Judith, my treasure, my wonder, my delight,
What prompted you to give me such a nip?
The editor of this literary page
Thought I might wish to challenge you, but no!
On the great roof of Michelangelo
The prophets and the sybils do not fight.
They speak with different voices for their age;
And poets, I trust, are of that fellowship.

How should I answer you? you, who swept like rain

Over the arid landscape of our verse
Six inches at Ayers Rock or the Barcoo
And, overnight the lyric everywhere
Covered the ground with blossom, filled the air
With scatter and chatter of bright wings again;
You, who give grain and vines where once there grew
Saltbush and spinifex and Paterson's curse.

And set, with a sybil's smile, your watershoot

Of song here in my valley of dry bones?
Plant on, but let me plant in my own way:
Tamborine Mountain is grand for a green thumb;
On Sinai, in the dry years when they come,
Nothing but thorn and cactus can take root;
But they survive where tenderer bud and spray
Shrivel to dust among the burning stones.

Plant what we will, we do not plant in vain.

Be prodigal then: God's plenty is our share;
Be Ceres, careless at her golden store;
Be to my desert, what you have always been:
Mons Visionis towards Gilead's distant green,
My bow of promise through drought-breaking rain,
My pillars of cloud and fire sent on before,
My cornucopia, my chrysostom, my despair.