On Riverview Road

(just round from the High School)

The smell of sweet sap

grows stronger daily as I drive past

where council workers 

are clearing toppled trees

that came down with half the hillside

after the last big rains.

It used to be a quarry.

Boulders fell down too.

When the clear-up began,

orange earth movers crawling about

half way up the hill 

looked like matchbox toys.

Today it was all smooth.

By late afternoon

even the sap smell had gone.

Now this patch of hillside 

has no trees at all, not one. It looks as if

it will collapse even easier next time.


Submitted for Poets United's Poetry Pantry #87

Generational Adolescence

I was just fifteen

when everything changed –

when freer children,

who were allowed to go

to movies like that,

leaped up and jived in the aisles

to Rock Around the Clock,

even – or especially –

in staid country towns

around regional Australia.

I was still fifteen

when Elvis arrived.

Handsome as the devil;

voice of an angel.

The mothers and fathers hated

his slim gyrating hips.

We loved the tilt of his lips,

the wicked light

in his laughing eyes,

and the singing, the songs, the beat.

At seventeen

I moved to Melbourne.

Every Saturday night

there was a Town Hall dance.

Hawthorn, Caulfield, Albert Park, Box Hill.

Diane Rosewall and I went to them all.

We wore circle skirts, wide belts,

flat ballerina slippers,

and white flouncy petticoats

hemmed with ropes.

We were good middle-class girls.

One night two real-live bodgies

claimed us for a dance.

Oh how those wild boys moved!

swinging us through their legs

and up on their hips.

Oh how we twirled and swirled.

But we must have seemed tame to them.

They thanked us very politely

and went hunting faster girls.

Tall lads they were,

in the extreme of fashion:

skinny black pants, long jackets

with shoulder pads and shiny lapels,

their hair slicked back

into lovely ducktails.

Oh how our careful parents

would have disapproved!

That makes anything

more exciting.

Or anyone.

I ended up choosing men

who worked with their bodies,

rode motorbikes,

knew how to use their fists;

men who swore.

Later I preferred

beards and flowing hair.

I wore long robes. We sat and smoked

in dark coffee lounges, listening to Folk.

But that was after the era ended;

the wild boys and girls and the rest

all sang "That'll Be the Day,"

and cried when Buddy died.

And it doesn't matter where I am,

every time the band

plays Rock Around the Clock,

I'm up and dancing

and shouting the words

till I drop. Till the broad daylight.

Written 14-15/3/07; posted now to accompany previous post, Face to Face, 
and submitted along with that to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #86 
(not #87, sorry for posting wrong  link there; try the next).

Face to Face

for Diane

It’s raining again. The clouds

cover the full moon’s face.

But I can’t be cast down tonight —

my friend, fifty years gone,

found me tonight on facebook.

Her face, so long unseen,

looks very much the same

as that girl’s whom I remember.

Only five years ago

I wrote her into a poem

of her and me as young things,

going dancing. She tells me now

I haven’t changed much either,

the years have been kind. (We put

our best photos on facebook.)

But yes, the years have been kind. 

The face of the Lady Moon

will not stay hidden long. In any case,

tonight my heart is dancing

like a young thing, like a girl.

For I know that faces return

and are recognised. 

How lovely the face of my friend — 

my friend who is named for the moon.




Submitted to dVerse OpenLink Night #30

and to Open Link Monday at imaginary gardens with real toads 
and also to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #86