A poem for Scarlet Fever

A withered current 
Is my poetic brain
Words incoherent
Flow like flat champagne.

With stony grace
I bear this curse
Tense my face
And fashion verse.

Words are lean
My will almost gone
Strong caffeine
Helps me soldier on.

But the reader’s grief
Spills with my twaddle
Blessed relief
Is in the empty bottle. 

Duckingham Palace

Duckingham Palace (Mark 1)
Despite Tony's threats to deal with my ducks according to the instructions of various recipes, he built this in June last year.  This model is able to be disassembled and is snake-proof.  Unfortunately, it has primitive flooring and unreliable roofing.

Duckingham Palace (Mark 2)Sustainable architecture to withstand monsoonal rains including features such as recycled decking and a double ceiling.

And a roost to accommodate the diversity of the blended family! 

The happy blended family.  Mother (centre), daughter (left) and aunty.

The World Is Too Much With Us

The Rooster wanted to come out for the weekend.  I’m a self-confessed pain in the environmental arse when it comes to fuel.  I can’t take a drive unless I consider my carbon tyre-track.  Am I able to do other errands on this trip?  Could it wait?  Could I walk?  The Rooster coming out for the weekend involved a bus trip from Cairns.  Surely a bus is a more energy efficient way to travel. 

     After I made peace with nature for my vicarious recreational abuse of fossil fuels, the Rooster arrived on the bus on our tenth day of rain.  What better place to spend a wet weekend than the farm.

     The Rooster is a giant, silent presence that moves slowly, mostly towards the sofa where he sprawls or to the kitchen to refuel his ever-growing body.  The Rooster never wastes words.  When he finally talks, it’s for good reason.

     “Mum,” he said on Saturday morning.  “Can you help me with my English?”

     I’ve always found it difficult to help the boys with their work at boarding school.  Email and the phone is no substitute for presence. Worse, the Rooster tends to ask for help the night before his assessment is due.  I can’t do anything, but a quick edit for spelling and grammar.  I am still working with him on his time management, but time has little relevance for him apart from Time to eat, Time to sleep, Time to go hunting, Time to play footy and so on.

     So I was surprised to learn his English draft was due on Tuesday.  The Rooster has never been an early bird and I was excited to actually have a chance to help him, in time and place.

     His task was to analyse a poem from history and relate it to a contemporary issue with reference to the historical context and author’s circumstances.

     He had chosen the following poem and I read only a few lines before I felt I was on a dinghy in the Torres Strait in heavy seas and boxing tide with a bad case of motion sickness.  I’ve never been keen on poetry which stems from pure ignorance and a little fear of words that aren’t garden-variety Standard Australian English. I seriously regretted not paying attention when poetry was on the class menu thirty years ago.

The World Is Too Much With Us

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

     The Rooster saw my distress, but he had it all worked out and gave me a run down.  He had annotated the poem, defined the whacky words like “sordid boon,” “lay waste our powers” and “bares her bosom” and checked out the identities of Proteus and Triton (I was thinking a South African flower and a Mitsubishi ute).  We Googled a bit of history and I could see why the teacher set the task.  That’s when I started to get very depressed about the state of our world.

     Wordsworth wrote the poem in the early 19^th century.  He is lamenting the First Industrial Revolution which led humanity away from the glory of Nature towards machines, chemicals, mining of coal and iron ore, gas lighting, manufactured products and the construction of roads, rail and waterways.  People flocked from the countryside to the cities to get work in the factories and enjoy a better standard of living for the first time in English history. 

     Wordsworth was a Romantic poet who wrote, not mushy declarations of love, but about the beauty of Nature, favouring emotion and intuition as opposed to the current trend of the time (the Age of Enlightenment) which praised reasoning and analytical thinking.  That he capitalised Nature suggests to me he’s keen on it having proper noun status rather being an ordinary abstract noun. 

     “We have given our hearts away” is a reference to turning our backs on nature.

     The “sordid boon” is the sick materialism people have embraced following the increase in the standard of living brought about by the First Industrial Revolution.  I thought that was a bit hypocritical considering Wordsworth was socially privileged and with ‘help’ he would have had the time to enjoy nature.  On the other hand, if you are illiterate and spend sixteen hours a day in a factory weaving fabric, I understand a ‘get and spend’ approach to life. 

     “For this, for everything, we are out of tune.”  Humans are on a path of devastation.

     Wordsworth wishes he was a pagan so he wasn’t so disturbed by the way humanity has embraced consumerism.  

     Hang on!  Isn’t he talking about the digital revolution of the 21^st century and the materialism that sustains people using money they don't have (credit) to live unsustainable lifestyles?

     If Wordsworth thought things were bad 200 years ago, he’d be writing in his grave today.  Humanity has declined to new depths and we are headed for unprecedented disaster; an increasingly warmer world, the loss of natural habitat through urbanisation and rising temperatures, uncertain food security, political instability, an overwhelmingly indolent first world population that has caused the problem and then, ultimate anarchy, war and death.  Of course, there will be whimpering.

     I’d had enough of poetry. It was depressing.  I felt like a drink, but I did some yoga to calm my nerves while the Rooster worked on his assignment.

The Glade.  Before the rain.

     Then the two of us went for a long walk, he slashing weeds with his bush knife, me revelling in this little pocket of nature largely untouched by industry (except that it is tertiary growth rainforest and there are more weeds than native grasses!).

     There had been torrential rain during the week.  I’d never seen the Dirran Creek in flood.  Where there had been a crystal-clear stream meandering around sentinel-like boulders, there was a single milky river, swollen with rage.  What I saw wasn’t the peak of floodwater.  Metres higher, trees, logs and debris had been discarded on the path we walked.

     A tree, thirty metres tall, flicked asunder.

The Glade, after flood waters have receded.

     It occurred to me Wordsworth might not be so disturbed if he knew nature could deposit a tree, weighing a tonne, two metres up a hill.  Perhaps he didn’t credit nature with enough resilience.  For a few moments, till I returned to the house and listened to the road trains rumbling on the highway transporting imported electronics, clothes manufactured in Asian sweatshops and mixed berries shipped from China (more on this one), I thought Nature might come through the 21^st century with nothing more than bruises, cuts and abrasions.

Respecting the legal rights of those facing execution: An oxymoron

After unsuccessful appeals, flamboyant Chinese mining billionaire, Liu Han and four others, including his brother, Liu Wei were executed on Monday for tyrannical mafia-type crimes including murder. 
     Since taking office two years ago, President Xi Jinping has come down hard on corruption and Liu Han came under the hammer, especially after a drive-by shooting alerted the authorities to his and colleagues' activities.
     On a positive note, the court allowed the five men to meet with their families according to press releases (their poor mothers!).
     'The executed criminals' legal rights were fully protected,' the court said!

Like holding him for the first time

I love my boys and every so often, actually quite often, I can’t resist touching them in an affectionate way; ruffling their hair as I walk past them or placing a peck on their cheeks (shoulders in the case of TK and Sutchy) as we say good night or punching them on the arm if they give me cheek. They are my babies.

Clearly two of my boys feel the same way!

     My relationship with the boys is different to that with Seffy or even Ashlea and Ciehan.  It could be I can’t sever the umbilical cord with the boys or TK, Sutchy and I spent so much time together in their toddlerhoods.  Or I don’t understand boys or their actions and I am compensating with affection.  It could be because society tells us males are less emotional than females and I am ‘modelling’ good behaviour.  Then again it might just be part of a normal mother-son relationship or what defines a mother-son relationship.

     Or perhaps I feel the boys need more guidance through life.  After all girls don't fart in their friends' faces or 'moon' at inappropriate moments, they don't need to be told three times to wash up then be threatened with dire consequences and they don't need to be asked, 'So, what could you have done differently?'      
     Who knows, but all year I followed Peter Greste’s imprisonment in Egypt in December 2013 and release last week through the ABC.  From the moment he was arrested I thought of his mother and how she must have felt to have him incarcerated on the other side of the world following a flawed trial involving ludicrous charges, when all he’d done was his job.  I thought about Lois Greste and I realised I could not imagine her anguish.  Of course, my heart went out to Peter’s father and his two brothers, but I as the mother of three sons, I had more in common with her.

      How could she cope not being able to hug him or punch him good naturedly when he was cheeky?

     I was reminded of a visit, eight years ago to a friend, 42 at the time.  Her father had also dropped in. After dinner we were sitting around talking.  My friend and her father were on the couch and he'd draped his arm along the back.  For a few moments he moved his hand to stroke her hair as she talked, just as I did to one-year-old Kibby at the time.  I thought it was beautiful gesture and I was determined never to stop showing affection to my children.

     I had a near-teary moment the other day. I was reading about Peter Greste being reunited with his family at the Brisbane Airport.  His mother said of hugging him, ‘it was like holding him for the first time.’  And I knew exactly what she meant.