GREENOCK circa 1875

When the silky white gauze
Of eddying fogs
And the teeming downpours
Of colourless rain
Were coincidentally absent,
And there were silent shafts
Of feeble sunlight filtering
Through the capacious clouds,
Then the bluish green of the pitching hills

Above the yawning glens,
And the grey swells of the firth
That slapped the bows of merchant vessels,
Were pleasant enough to enchant
First-time travellers
Among the thousands of seamen
Who crewed the hundreds of ships
That sought the dozens of wharves
Fronting the town.
Had they journeyed
During epochs preceding
The nineteenth century,
They might have been further charmed
By the sight of fishing villages
And the frayed sails and weathered boats
Of earnest seekers of maritime staples.
Now, tucked into mellow folds
In a patch of earth that was abutted
By the uplands to the south
And the waters to the north,
There were refineries that spewed
The sickly bouquet of burning sugar,
Textile factories from which listless columns
Of steam rose skyward,
And squalid tenements where life was hard,
Hearts were habitually broken
By the hammers of poverty,
And people frequently prayed
To an old deity
For the consolations of another life.
On the shoreline,
Beside the chaotic array of docks
And the impressive façade of the customs house,
There were shipyards,
In which the technological marvels
Of their day were constructed.
West of the town centre were neighbourhoods
Where the money of commerce
Had found opulent homes,
Cohabiting snugly
With the oblivious recipients
Of fortuitous inheritances
And the shrewd entrepreneurs
Of revolutions inspired
By the new gods
Of mechanised industry.

The photograph shows Greenock's Custom House Quay in 1878.

ISCARIOT

Recalled at last to my profession,
My true calling,
Scornfully sacrificed to avarice,
I found myself
Transported to the place of peace,
That jewel in a coastline
Supposedly free of cold and horrors,
A port of call, a lionised entrepot
For slave traders and explorers
And the rest of empire's captives, now released.

It was all but unrecognisable, a shining urban shock,
Transformed by new winds of conquest,
Tornadoes and hurricanes that no one can block,
The storms of hordes that respect no borders.
Like the old world, it was a maze of congestions,
Answers incapable of asking the right questions,
Amidst thoughtless betrayals by expertly misinformed teachers.
Streets blistered where flowers had rambled,
Shadows of architecture's follies lapped at the beaches,
And diesel fumes fouled paths where pedestrians once ambled.

The colonial house of my irreverent and forgetful bloom
Had long ago been acquired by a criminal of commerce;
But it was a short walk from work to my sorry studio room,
Furnished with rejects from Bunnings, KMart and worse.
When I arrived, home was perched above a sports ground,
Its grandstands sculptured by their floodlit surround.
There, athletic lads waited, wearing the lolly greens of the capital's teams,
Impatient for the coming contest, too young to sense the treachery of dreams.

ISOLATION

These are empty days,

Free of association.

'What have you been doing?'

'Writing' - end of conversation.

Sometimes I peruse the media,

Telling me I'm the anti-good,

Deserving only blame,

And my faith is falsehood.

Why are the virtuous

So keen to keep me alive

When they hate me so much?

Is it because at end of life I'll thrive?

PORT JACKSON, circa 1818

A sea of emeralds, sparkling jewels,

Offspring of a vivid sun

In a foreign sky’s uncanny blank,

Free of clouds except for a few frills,

Diaphanous, white and downy,

Like the stolen feathers of angels.

A peerless pool of deep teal teases,

Fluttering with the flurries of mellow breezes

And splashing lazily

On the beaches of coves

Shielded from the elements,

Draped with shade from headlands

Placed there solely for the purpose

Of rendering the weather irrelevant.

Vegetation crowds the shorelines,

Painted by a brush dipped

In the contents of a palate

Offering only roasted shades

Of olive green and toasted beige.

Trees sway and bend around

As if a moderate puff would surely break them,

Their branches emitting a swishing sound,

Pleasing to ears accustomed to the ocean’s blasts,

But not loud enough to muffle the rude squawks

Of strange birds from prehistoric pasts,

Occasionally ceasing their din

And making awkward swoops.

Those trees seemed ugly to the exiles,

As if disfigured by fire,

With scraps of bark hanging

Like skin shed by reptiles,

Or the shredded backs

Of men lashed by the cat,

And bearing leaves

Too curved and too flat

To perform their natural functions,

Despite the of vibrant show

Made by red-tipped new growth.

Above the gritty sand

And random rocks at the waters’ edges

There are shapeless heaths and hedges,

Seemingly wrought by the inattentive hands

Of a distant relative of the mother of nature

Who had sculpted the ordered terrains

Of the old world’s hinterlands.

To the north and west,

Beyond the seaside bluffs,

In solitary stands above rough tufts,

Gushing like refreshed hopes,

There are spouts of leafy glories,

Spilling on the rolling slopes

Of immigrants’ territories.

PERFORATION

I watch a flickering screen

On a black and white television,

Where the channel features

Only repeat programs

That are scratchy re-runs

Of malignant memories,

Somehow rearranged

On a zany timeline

As flashes of inconsequence

And ferocious fabricators

Of everlasting shame

And ruinous guilt.

Even the ordinary tilt

Of everyday life

Comes tainted in weird ways

By stains invariably ascribed

To well-intentioned actions

Or innocent negligence,

Bringing an unceasing sense

Of culpability for hurts inflicted,

And ripping open a scar

Of forlorn humiliation.

At the end there is anxiety.

It is time to panic

When I realise that all I am

Is a victim of a theft

Of pride in endeavours.

AND THE PIPER PLAYED THE TUNE

‘And the Piper Played the Tune’ can be purchased at Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Smashwords, Booktopia, Fishpond and a range of other online retailers.  Paperback and eBook versions are available.

Two exiled princes, one a gifted musician and the other an invincible warrior, leave their hard-hearted father’s prosperous realm and travel to a world of wonder outside the conventional boundaries of time and place.  They encounter hermits with magical powers, a capricious sea ogress, an alluring mermaid, patriotic princesses, wily astrologers, scheming courtiers, brutal pirates, and remarkable animals.  Both princes are eventually presented with opportunities to become rulers of foreign lands threatened with invasion by warlike neighbouring principalities.

The central storyline of ‘And the Piper Played the Tune’ is not a new one.  It follows closely many aspects of Sunthorn Phu’s epic poem about the exploits of Phra Aphai Mani – a masterpiece that occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of Thai literature.  Sunthorn Phu’s poem blends realistic incidents and events driven by unnatural forces, frequently in the context of hazardous sea voyages.  Accordingly, the saga of Phra Aphai Mani has often been compared to Homer’s Odyssey.  ‘And the Piper Played the Tune’ is David Morisset’s respectful attempt to make Sunthorn Phu’s epic more widely known among English-speaking readers.

A MOOD DISORDER

 “Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.”

Mayo Clinic

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I have a suspicion that society, in its heart of hearts, despises depressives because it knows they have a point: the recognition that life is finite and sad and frightening.”

Tim Lott, The Guardian

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why.  Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.”

Stephen Fry

“It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness.  I know sadness.  Sadness is to cry and to feel.  But it’s cold absence of feeling – that really hollowed-out feeling.”

J K Rowling

“In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.  I loved it because it was all I had.  I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile.  I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence was my pain.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain … it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.”

William Styron, Darkness Visible

NAMING 2020

Those who endure 2020 to see old age

Will stand tall when its history is recalled.

Though they might have memories

Of fire and flood,

Drought and disease,

Loneliness and anxiety,

Idleness and poverty,

And the reality of mortality,

They will remember with no regrets

The sacrifices offered,

The patience practised,

When shows were shuttered,

Merriments were abolished,

Tournaments were shelved,

Livelihoods were demolished,

And the era of easy travel unravelled.

What stories they will recount in their flowing cups!

But, in standing so tall and telling their tales,

They will be perched atop the shoulders of giants –

Titans who do not bear the famed names

Of politicians, nor scientists, nor financiers.

Those shoulders belong to the nameless –

The workers on the front line of service

In healthcare, emergency response, education,

Logistics, and the rest of the essentials –

And their invisible loved ones.

Could it be that heroes facing some future ordeal

Will deem themselves of lesser steel

Than those who fought on the fronts of 2020

And dared to secure posterity?

Note: Acknowledgement is obviously due to the Battle of Agincourt speech of William Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V”.

THE SWALE

By the railway line,

Where it crossed a culvert,

There was a shady swale

And a stagnant, shallow pond

Beneath a wiry willow tree.

For some reason I was curious,

So I looked into the still water

And I saw the ancient shapes –

Two green crocodiles submerged –

One a small adult,

The other youthful and pert,

Both at rest, but both alert.

There was a young woman

Relaxing on the grassy bank,

Dangling her feet in the water,

Tempting, it seemed to me,

Those cruel reptiles to attack.

So I warned her of the danger

But she laughed,

Closing her eyes to doze

And drifting away in her dreams.

I thought of my neighbours,

Who walked their dogs

Beside these murky streams,

And I visited them

To report the predators’ presence.

Now, their property was a place

Of horrors for me,

For they kept exotic fish in tanks

And clammy, carnivorous creatures in pits.

Among the menagerie were monsters –

Amphibians with round, gaping mouths

Full of razor teeth that dripped venom.

One of these beasts followed me home

And tried to trap me on my threshold

As I fumbled with my front door keys,

So I screamed in fright at my plight.

Then a tiny, ginger cat appeared -
Domesticated or feral

I could not be sure –

But, with a savage lunge,

It slashed open the underbelly

Of my cold-blooded assailant.

And, after a short time,

The feline proceeded to dine

On the freak's lifeless flesh.

FLAMINGOS AT NGORONGORO

From afar I perceived the pink

As a sprinkle across the brink

Of a pool, so mirrored, so blue

That its hue made me think

About shallow Oceanic shores -
Warm waters of former lifetimes -

And the clear eyes of women

From more clement climes.

Blessed by closer inspection

I watched the flamingos frolic

With flair that flouted the threats

In this crater of insurrection,

Where blushing birds are prey

To hungry hunters watching

In every shadowy place

On every flawless sunlit day.

EVIDENCE OF LIFE

This collection of poems, written over the past twelve years, features David Morisset’s reflections on the physical world and its effects on mood, memory and experience.

Locations visited include parts of Australia, America, Iran and Thailand. The backdrops vary from urban terrains to predominantly natural settings and, in several cases, the poems draw on recollections of times long past.

David's verses encourage us to be acutely aware of our surrounds and to value the ways life allows us to interact with our environment regardless of whether it showcases natural design or human ingenuity or a blend of both.

The collection is available here at Amazon.

BUTTERFLY SKIES

The butterfly skies are back,

With clouds that remind me

Of long hot summers past,

When the weather was innocent

And the heat made us warm.

The butterfly skies are dappled blue,

Flicked from an artist’s brush,

Playfully sprayed on a canvas

Of off-white stretched full-width

Across an endless clear horizon.

The butterfly skies were ever there,

Taken for granted like morning,

Teeming with fertile sunshine

That kissed life into all the living,

And bid them worship the light.

But where are the butterflies now?