SPRING IN SYDNEY

Nothing isolates you as much as the constant closeness of the city.
It tugs at your twisting intestines and planes away the sharp edges of your brain.
You conform to the formality at the corrosive cost of discarded sensibility.
Your deadened body becomes invisible to all but looters and miscreants.

Respectable institutions vie for any spare space in the scarfaced skyline,
Their foundations built on the princely proceeds of extortion and extinction,
And their stately steel frames funded by debt and stolen goods and slavery,
While the traffic terrorises you and demands nothing less than elite athleticism.

No-one else seems so beset with such forgettable anonymity -
There is unseen purpose and apparent direction in their speedy strides.
Their faces are flushed with extant expectations and rude rewards
And their eyes glimmer and glow as if they had never known loneliness.

But the harbour still shimmers in a show of deep blue and tolerates no distress
And the gardens embrace the stacked sandstone shore with bright blissful blushes,
While the bridge stands sentinel with its steely span set simply at ever eternal
And the breeze blows the boats before it and chops the chaste cerulean swell.

In the afterglow rough hope can be rekindled
But every ignition requires a fiercer more foolhardy flame.

FROM A DEAD LOVER by Mary Lang

This poignant poem was written by Mary Lang, an almost forgotten Australian poet, probably during the 1930s.  The picture shows Mount Damavand in Iran under a clear night sky.

I am here.

Though mute, invisible,

remote untouchable,

I am here.

Do you remember

my voice that spoke to you

and called and cried to you?

Do you remember?

Can you forget

my eyes wide, wondering,

or half closed, hungering?

Can you forget?

The shadows thicken.

Between the meeting and the parting,

between the death and the awakening

the shadows thicken.

Do you remember

(I can remember)

the moon that we cried for,

the star that we reached for?

I have not forgotten,

can you forget?

JUGGLERS

Bronze skin stretched tight and borne brazen,
Black eyes blinking with blazing fire;
Why did I leave it up to strife
To save your bashed benighted life?

Ebony hair swirled up and swept
Around your face and fierce features;
How did I set you far aside
When your heart must have crashed and cried?

Memories and must have moments
Made us both mere martyred monsters
Of times when we were blessed and bold -
Juggling what we could never hold.

BUTCHERS PARADE

David Morisset’s inspiration for his new novel was Riverstone, where he attended school, played rugby league, drank his first beer, fell in love for the first time, and decided to leave to explore the world.  But David is not Horrie Sherwood, the main character, and Redgate, the principal location, is not Riverstone.  In fact, Horrie is much more like one of David’s school friends (now deceased), and Riverstone has been simplified to turn it into Redgate.  Above all, of course, Horrie is a creation of David Morisset’s imagination and Redgate exists only in his mind.

David’s hope is that this novel will entertain readers and help them understand what we have become in these early years of the twentieth-first century by revisting a time when Australia was on the brink of momentous changes.  The narrative adopts the perspective of nostalgic realism, presenting the past as if it were a series of black and white photographs showing the good with the bad and everything in between.

Set in the third quarter of the twentieth century, most of the action of 'Butchers Parade' takes place in Redgate, a meatworks town on the semi-rural western fringe of Sydney.  The tale is dominated by the hulking figure of Horrie, a young meatworker, who spends his spare time at the Railway Hotel and plays in the front row of local rugby league teams.  Horrie loves Redgate and its people but he is conscripted by the army and sent to fight in Vietnam.  On his return to Redgate, Horrie is a troubled man, haunted by distorted recollections of brutal battles and caught up in a romance that seems hopeless.

David Morisset is an Australian writer, who has published novels, poetry and short stories.  His poem, 'Persian Princess', was commended in the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards 2009).  He is a former diplomat and economist.

'Butchers Parade' is available now for purchase at Amazon, CreateSpace, Smashwords and other distributors including iBooks.