Dan Guenther: Two Poems
The Kite Surfers’ Chorus, Cronulla, 2018
The soprano you hear on Cronulla’s Shark Island
as the night falls
could only be a benign sea-nymph,
a daughter of Nereus,
Lord of dark oceans,
whose Sirens calling over the waves
once led seafarers
to their doom,
an illuminating fate wandering Odysseus escaped.
You heard their four part harmonies from a distance
before you observed them sitting on the rocks
combing out their hair,
their melodies evoking old themes
of mermen and mermaids living in the moment,
and luring others to release and liberation,
temptations as temporary and impermanent
as footprints left on the sand,
about to be washed away.
Dan Guenther
The Last Story
(For my grandmother at 94, born in Austria-Hungary)
Her last tale revealed a story within a story,
a tale of courage never heard before
at your bedside meetings,
the ones where she often told
an idealized version of the past,
seeing the hand of Fate in every trivial event.
The paths she traveled leaving Europe
led to family myths
not always aligned with the truth,
the real history
of those defeats hidden from us
as she tried to reinvent herself.
At your last meeting sluggish flies swarmed in the heat,
and she recalled a time when the rains brought relief,
a parade of passing clouds summoning a memory
of that day her brother’s horse cavalry rode away
to engage the first mechanized infantry,
an obscure fight out on the Polish Plains where he was lost.
Dan Guenther
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