Graeme Hetherington: Two Poems

Playground Triumph

I dreamt I couldn’t choose which arm

To bowl with at recess and send

The rusty stick-propped battered bit

Of tin flying across the yard,

Miss Smith’s grip hurting my right wrist

During Transcription till she’d swung

Me from the left and I’d knocked down

My father’s middle stump, betrayed

The cack-handedness he’d bequeathed,

Which she said was how Satan wrote.

I woke distressed, recalling that

I’d answered back, when he, beside

Himself yelled “you’re to give up sport

And help me make ends meet, as does

Your brother’s bursary”, with “my

Hat-trick today at school’s worth more!”

Graeme Hetherington

Intimations of a Search for Poems
(West Coast, Tasmania)

I’ve ended up like them, those lone

Old timers fossicking for glints

Of gold in mullock, whom I met

In childhood on the track, and still

Sore from a hiding more than half-

Envied for single lives in shacks,

Who’d ask where I was bound, and…