LOCKDOWN

Perhaps, when we were young,
There was far too much sun.
It was there almost every day —
Until a metallic sky trickled rain
And stiff breezes pleated a briny bay.
In childhood, it seemed, we never knew pain.
There were freedoms then —
Some people had fought for them
(Or so we were assured)
And discarded their swords.
Then, laughter was our wordless friend,
Before we were targets for faraway blames.
That all came later — an unimaginable end,
Beyond the sidelines of our youthful games.

Confined to the roads
Of a tedious neighbourhood,
Away from the exceptional sea
And the wild windblown heath,
I walk the wearisome streets
And look at the humdrum houses,
Wishing that I owned one
Or two —
I’d rent one out
To someone poor
Like me.

I have known cold.
No, much more than cold —
Chilly days,
Glacial nights,
And icy hindsight.

Now we are old, under skies unkind.
We squint behind our eyeglasses
So we can see the sugary sun shine
And the mulberry moon gleam as it passes.
Somewhere, mad waves still roll with a roar
Across shivering sands on an uncertain shore.
But the main events have all been concluded,
With the awards allocated to the somewhat able.
Luckless others lost their lives or mistook their way,
Like bankrupts who found they could never pay.
Jinxed paupers weren’t ever invited to the table
Where the spoils were eaten by those who colluded.

A LAND THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW

Paperback versions of David Morisset's newest novel are available via Amazon in Australia and overseas. Various eBook editions can be purchased through Kindle, iBooks and other online retailers.

Many of Australia’s first European settlers were convicts transported across the seas from the British Isles. There were also free immigrants. They included entrepreneurs, farmers, soldiers, mariners, miners, and clerical and industrial workers. While online databases have made it possible for today’s Australians of European descent to trace their ancestry and acquire an understanding of the outline of their family trees, amateur genealogists usually confront baffling questions. What events led to criminal transgressions that deserved exile in a distant penal colony? How did convicts win their freedom and earn an ostensibly honest living in unfamiliar surroundings? Why did men and women leave urban slums and industrial occupations for rural lives on the other side of the world? How did their progeny — the sons and daughters of convicts and free settlers alike — fare as the decades unfolded?

Partly inspired by Patrick White’s ‘The Tree of Man’, David Morisset’s novel, ‘A Land that You do not Know’, imagines the lives and times of Hugh Wadkin, an English convict, and Maggie Kintyre, a Scottish free settler. Both became residents of the Hawkesbury District on the outskirts of Sydney — although Maggie arrived seventy years after Hugh had first trudged along the Windsor Road on his way to the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Their circumstances were dramatically different. They brought with them sharply contrasting expectations. Eventually, their Australian family trees would intertwine.

THE TRAVEL BAN

It’s two years now since I held your soft hand

Beside the lake, while the sun set so red

It almost set the long jetty aflame.

Two years of wasted time and stabbing dread

That our days — our moments — are passing by,

Bringing us nearer to the night we die.

The lake is cold in this viral winter.

Sunsets are diminished, and never warm,

And the jetty is twisted and broken

After the havoc of the last freak storm.

Each night at dinner I cry, unstable,

I can’t see your face across the table.

THE LOVE SONG OF CHARLES MARLOW*

When did the world become so hostile
To everyone but the chosen few -
The princesses and the princes
Who, either unwittingly or cunningly,
Serve the father of lies?
It seems to degrade with every passing day,
As I grow old and stoop
To roll the bottoms of my white flannel trousers
And stretch my arms upwards,
Guiding my brush and comb
To part my hair behind,
Before I walk upon the beach
To search for silent mermaids
Who always swim just out of reach,
Eluding the ragged claws
And fang-ridden maws
That lurk beneath the water,
Wind-blown, white and black.

Although I am present,
I am, seemingly, invisible.
And, yet, dogs bark at me,
Baring their teeth and growling
As if they’ve perceived a ghost.
Perhaps they can see me
As I was at my top, my biggest, my most,
But, then, I would have banished them,
Craven curs that they always were,
Their harangues would end with a whimper.
Or maybe they can see the black mutt
That yaps at my heels.
Are they dogging me with howling
Aimed at my best fiend?
For it seems I have no friends
To fill my evenings, mornings, afternoons,
Beside porcelain and coffee spoons.
They have gone, dispersed
Like a fog that once lingered by pools,
For there is no more time for them and me,
No more ancient kindnesses from each to each.
So I spend my days inventing scenarios
That might approximate the real,
Inhabiting a fictional realm as its king,
Or, more literally,
Its omniscient third person,
Fearful that I will be read
As a fool, and ridiculed for it,
Or, much worse,
Derided as a mere attendant lord.

Some days I raise my eyes
And look beyond the window sash,
Wondering whether I dare
To reach for that fleece again.
But usually the view is fouled by clouds,
Gathering just above the marshes
That fester in the waste land where I live.
So, I consider the case for oblivion
And often find it compelling,
Until I ponder how it might turn out
For a suicidal heart of darkness.
When Kurtz, with his last pant,
His ivory face intense with despair,
Gasped ‘the horror, the horror’,
Was he looking back
On his vicious existence?
Or was he looking ahead
At the misery and mistreatment
That awaited him in hell?

* With acknowledgements to TS Eliot and Joseph Conrad.

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?