Critical Times

LETTER TO THE EDITOR
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
SENT WED 25/3/09

Editor,

Remember the poem “Who Built Thebes…. and The Great Wall of China”? Watching the worthy tributes to Jorn Utson on ABC television today, (25/3/09), I could not help but notice there was no acknowledgement for the thousands of Builders Laborers who built the difficult structure, one of whom is celebrated in verse by the late Denis Kevans, Australia’s under-celebrated “poet lorikeet”.

I submit the poem to your readers for them to decide whether a separate memorial event should be organized for “Paddy” ? Maybe Paul Robeson, the very first Opera singer at the Opera House (1960?) could get the gig instead of Neil Finn and Our Kate ?

The Ghost of Sydney Opera House

There’s a ghost in Sydney Opera House,
Who sings in all the shows,
The glittering tiaras sometimes
Tumble on their toes,
The ghost he was a rigger,
And he’d sing up in the shell,
And we sank a fleet of schooners
In the First and Last Hotel.

read more »

“Your friends will never forget you”,

the fluttering leaflet said,
“Your friends will never forget you”, and then o’er the valley spread,
The wide sky cowed in sorrow, and the eyes of the angels wept,
For a promise made by the soldiers that their leaders never kept.

For the soldiers are there when you need ‘em,

they’re there to suffer and die,
And to make the eyes of the angels weep in the depths of the tropical sky,
And the soldiers are there laugh it off, and shoulder their blistering gun,
And fight anew, in the mud light glue, and the sweat of the tropical sun.

And solders were there, and their mates were there,

their mates, the East Timorese,
Who fought and died beside them in the night of the jungle trees,
Who fought and bled and suffered so Australia might still be free,
And the Aussies cried, when their leaders lied, and poisoned the Timor Sea. read more »

In quartz contentment of the stone
That from the people’s pearl did grow,
Slow brewed the loss of all we own
And buried deep the world we know.

Such suns that rise as shapes slip by
Where gold time gluts the sea and stars,
Where Death has dark dominion
Over citadel and bars.

Where music of the finer kind
Is frozen from our mortal clay;
Lest poignancy cure the prison mind
And save it from decay.

read more »

This poem is composed entirely of
actual quotes from George W. Bush.
The quotes have been arranged for
aesthetic purposes by Washington
Post writer Richard Thompson.

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Geoff Goodfellow of Semaphore, South Australia, is one of perhaps a handful of people in Australia who derive an income from working as a poet. And it’s often bare subsistance money – perhaps due to the content. Among other things he writes about work and workers. read more »