John Whitworth: Three poems
Angry Penguin
For Ern Malley, many of whose haunting lines are here incorporated
In the twentyfifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary.
Loose-lipped, imperious, I stalk my cage
In the twentyfifth year of my age,
My bardbrow beetles as I swell with rage,
Robber of dead men’s dreams whose eyes are scary,
In the twentyfifth year of my age,
I hubble-bubble like a bloody Mary.
I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass
Where urchins pick their noses in the sun.
Mad monks incontinently chant their vespers,
I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass
On alien waters, fraught as chinese whispers,
As lights are doused and vanish one by one.
Black as my funeral hat, the swan of trespass
Makes urchins bloom like roses from a gun.
They bloom like roses in the bitter breeze
Like long-shanked ibises that on the Nile
Unmoving move, a calm immortal frieze
That bloom like noses in the bitter breeze,
The sole clerks of my metamorphoses
Who split the infinite beyond the bile,
Whose long semitic noses in the breeze,
Like souls from leaking roofs define a style.
John Whitworth
Storks
Storks are voiceless and communicate by clattering their beaks
Our stick-legged children muttering like storks,
Hooded, black-coated where the Devil walks,
Tread mystic patterns on unholy ground
And live in strange sussurances of sound.
Smoke from their smokes exhaling like a prayer
Into cathedrals of the empty air,
Whence is their genesis, what their intent,
These convocations of the innocent?
Listen, ah listen. Is it to our good?
Are they behaving in the ways they should?
Are they equivocating and deceiving?
Are their most secret dreams the dreams of leaving?
Stout walking boots raise little puffs of dust.
They stamp their feet to go, for go they must.
They smile like Angels but their hearts are stone.
They are here. They are there. They are gone. We are alone.
John Whitworth
Variation on a Forgotten Theme of James Fenton
I heard a bird sing sweetly.
I heard a bird sing long.
This, word for word, is what I heard
Of her sweet song:
Wrong today.
And wronger tomorrow,
And wrongest the day after that.
Broke and broker.
You take out the the joker
And put in the aristocrat.
Nine Hail Marys
Away with the fairies.
Remember to put out the cat.
Dead as a door
Nail, a coffin or floor
Nail, dead as a warfarin’d rat.
This is the sum of it.
Nothing will come of it.
Tell him to shit in his hat.
It was a bird of clockwork,
With interlocking plates,
And was the private property
Of William Butler Yeats.
John Whitworth
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.
Aug 29 2024
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
Aug 20 2024
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
Aug 16 2024
2 mins