Derek Wright: ‘Codling Moth’ and ‘T.V. Man’
Codling Moth
In the old country, in the other century,
they used to daub apple and pear tree trunks
with treated tar distilled into oil,
their bases wrapped in hessian on which the gunk
treacled down in a slick, a gloop of gold-brown
syrup on black web and bark—to no avail.
Once in the tree it would never be gone:
eggs hatched on leaves, caterpillars tunnelled the fruit;
half the delicious were golden, the others dun.
Here and now, above the possums’ scratches and scats,
Carbaryl’s getting the worm in its guts
but when you spray it’s either too soon or late
and mine are big ones, multifoliate.
Tending a fruit tree is like standing sentry
over young kids, dogs or poems that won’t come right.
They get love by the bushel, windfalls of patience,
but no defence. The corruption’s root to branch. Both
the kids and dogs come good, given half a chance,
but the tree will fail, not from bird and possum bites,
nor the poem from any outside thing. Their behemoth
is fifth column, a sign something’s wrong within.
Derek Wright
T.V. Man
He’d wheel the ageing monster from its nook,
rip the plastic hump from its back,
and it would look like what came out of it.
Transistors’ tiny ambulances cut
through massacres of screw and solder,
a bombed-out city with its roof torn off,
rust dripping from tube and wire,
anagrammed body parts and stuff.
Back then you could still, like primitives, delve
after the lightning in the machine,
the soul-sucking rays that let themselves in
when you dozed off in front of it at twelve.
More than our crouching idiot-selves
there had to be in that one-eyed glaze
which never seemed to leave your face,
that torture-shop racked with s and valves.
We sit up straight at the wall-screen, look around,
along. If we believe what comes from it now,
it snoops, listens; in corners of its bland surround
files away our data yet is still somehow
a less secretive, sinister presence
than that old zombified fluorescence
and its midnight curfew dot, vanishing
with the hunchbacked business of watching.
Derek Wright
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
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23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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2 mins