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from The Fiesta of Men by Mark O’Connor (pub Hale and Iremonger, 1983)
The goat-summers are over, the eternal noons
Virgil, Theocritus and Horace wove
into a timeless myth. You cannot find
those heat-hushed slopes, where goat-herds
whittling notes from reeds (while willow
twigs are thick with drinking bees) observe
the rank male-smelling beards at work for ever,
rasping the scented broom and heather.
Three thousand years have almost seen the end.
Infertile soil has nothing left to give.
But still they lick, those rough-tongued flocks
whose mouth’s the busy grave down which
whole hillsides pass. They gnaw the thornbush
from the cliff and chew the mossy clay
like dough. The Nymphs are Nereids now,
washed down by floods to roll
in the gasping sea; their fern-green haunts
a sunstruck canyon where cicadas
die of heat.
Yet olive and eucalypt stalk the stone redoubt
with tough guerilla troops in neutral green, will tread
the rock to pebbles, loess, marl and make
anew the chalk infertile soil.
I found this book of Mark O’Connor’s poems in Berkelouws while FM and I waited for a glass of red and a cheese platter to emerge. Wine bar bookshop. Perfect.
I encountered Mark – although he would not remember – in the mid 1970s – another denizen of Forest Lodge near Sydney Uni and a habituee of the Forest Loge pub – otherwise known to us as the Forrie Lorrie – a fore-runner of the Pig’s Arms. I used to share a house with Phil B in Annandale. He was a mate of the Mark O’Connor and another great poet (now late) John Forbes.
Looking back – how lucky were we to be able to share a schooner and occasionally hang with people who would later write poems like these two. And then I was reflecting on how we as callow youth so often do not realise important treasures in our world until later – with hindsight – after they’ve moved on.
Thank goodness for the printed word.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 