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…
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