A little ray from a shaded light
A colour splash on a field of white
Too short a day and a damn long night
A wreath of pain and a faded laugh
A rotten stick for a pilgrim's staff
An ounce of grain and a ton of chaff
A glimpse of youth and a woman's eyes
A long, long look into starlit skies
Mere chips of truth on a stream of lies
A glass of 'hops' and a pint of lees
A year of toil and an hour of ease
Till the worker drops to his broken knees
Then voices flout from life's garden walls
And bedposts grin and the earthworm calls
And lights go out as the curtain falls
Say, will the bark that was tempest-tossed
Still flounder on when the bar is crossed
And night grows dark and the path is lost?
Ah! Cast my lot in the realms of mist
With friends I've loved near the lips I've kissed
For Hell's to hot for a pessimist
With Head Erect I Fought The Fight
With head erect I fought the fight
Or mingled with the dance,
And now I merge into the night
With utter nonchalance.
We singers standing on the outer rim,
Who touch the fringe of poesy at times
With half-formed thoughts, rough-set in halting rhymes,
Through which no airy flights of fancy skim
We write 'just so,' an hour to while away,
And turn the well-thumbed stock still o'er and o'er,
As men have done a thousand times before,
And will again, just as we do to-day . . .
If I could take that rosebud from its stem,
And weare its petals in a simple rhyme,
So you could hear the bells of springtime chime
And you could see the flower soul in them
Or else, we'll say, a magpie on the limb,
Greeting the sunrise with its matin song
To catch the music as it floats along,
And link its spirit to a bush-child's hymn.
Or, if but then the limitations rise,
Like barriers across the mental plain,
And mists and things obscure the rhymer's brain,
And dull his ears, and cloud his blinking eyes.
And so we write as Nature sets her gauge
No worse than most, and better, p'raps, than some;
But should a man remain for ever dumb
When only rhyming fills his aimless page?
John Philip Bourke
With head erect I fought the fight
Or mingled with the dance,
And now I merge into the night
With utter nonchalance.
We singers standing on the outer rim,
Who touch the fringe of poesy at times
With half-formed thoughts, rough-set in halting rhymes,
Through which no airy flights of fancy skim
We write 'just so,' an hour to while away,
And turn the well-thumbed stock still o'er and o'er,
As men have done a thousand times before,
And will again, just as we do to-day . . .
If I could take that rosebud from its stem,
And weare its petals in a simple rhyme,
So you could hear the bells of springtime chime
And you could see the flower soul in them
Or else, we'll say, a magpie on the limb,
Greeting the sunrise with its matin song
To catch the music as it floats along,
And link its spirit to a bush-child's hymn.
Or, if but then the limitations rise,
Like barriers across the mental plain,
And mists and things obscure the rhymer's brain,
And dull his ears, and cloud his blinking eyes.
And so we write as Nature sets her gauge
No worse than most, and better, p'raps, than some;
But should a man remain for ever dumb
When only rhyming fills his aimless page?
