Thumbnail Stanzas

Were we needled?

Of course one was not reprimanded,

nor made to feel a scallywag,

but underneath his most lighthanded

verse why did that finger wag?

Literary Lunch

It’s fun to fork down noun and verb

Like so much soufflé and baklava,

then air the routine paragraphs,

your audience, of course, superb

in the routine of their laughs,

their durance in this crass palaver.

Farm Visit

I know a fellow with his rake

will face a lunging tiger snake,

yet when he airs his poems, their spices,

send that courage all to pieces.

I learn

We meet for lunch, his glasses gleam,

I put one word in his ignition,

then cop the torque of academe,

the horsepower of his erudition!

You studied us

What was it in your sidelong smile

conjured a veteran crocodile

where we could watch our lives unpacked

within your slow digestive tract?

I know a pariah

Some insult hooked him by the gut,

Some early, very knowing cut.

Square him? Nup, when justice must

include abasement of the just.

Nightly News

Why has this closing day bequeathed

your life molested, mine unscathed,

as though the meteor, crashing through your attic,

might claim its intervention democratic?

Our Poetry Vocation

Vocation? Sure, but not so pure,

   we also shop for fame,

which keeps our livelihoods too poor

   for any other home.

Intolerable to have no name

within the Supermart Of Yore,

   along The Stalls Of Claim.

     Sturt Highway Report

Level road and smallish hawks,

the truck’s a blip ten miles away.

Our breeze is blue and one cloud walks

in chef’s high hat and baggy daks

     across The Plains Of Hay.

Level mind, rollover skies,

this is no landscape of hooray,

yet, I’ll be chef, make soufflé rise

is not a fanciful surmise

     upon The Plains Of Hay.

But chef’s high hat and ample pants

will turn into a white soufflé

that’s carried east on pewter tray

to feed occasional mendicants

who work the paddocks of hooray

     beyond The Plains Of Hay.

Level stare and level mind,

that truck a blip still miles away,

low fences, perfectly aligned

enhance the sense of unconfined

     out on The Plains Of Hay.

                                     Alan Gould