my father got it in the neck in 1917
Crockery rattled in the kitchen
Of a tiny terrace house in Redfern.
Black lace doily’d a bewildered widow.
The evening that the news came through
Saw us three small children
Asking for dinner at tea-time
Like it was any other day.
My mother wailed.
Not quite comprehending
We cried ourselves to sleep that night
Sensing, correctly, a colossal shift.
Off civvy street
Wally and I joined up together in ’40 –
Two brothers.
It was the done thing.
My mother paled when we sauntered into the kitchen –
Our uniforms and slouch hats,
And our rude boots
Scuffing black into her nice clean linoleum.
Adversaries
We signed up to fight the Germans
Like our parents had.
We hadn’t even thought about the Japs
Who at the time
Might have seemed to us
Somewhat beneath our dignity.
Proving grounds
I recall reeling hard against
A snag beneath the surface,
Bending the rod with
A child’s thin-lipped determination.
When the line snapped
Sending a whisper of thread
Curling like a burnt hair
Over the river
Dad stepped up to me
And took the rod from my hands.
He slipped the handline
Into my palm.
The one for women and tiddlers.
Mum
On the day we shipped out
She took me aside
When my brother wasn’t looking.
She said:
Look after Wally will you?
I. Grudges
I have noticed that the infant’s soft hand,
By some primordial reflex,
Will close involuntarily around a finger
Or lock of hair.
Snatching and the clenched fist
Are ours by instinct.
Opening the palm is a learned gesture.
Invasion
Invasion is a narrowed man
Half rubbed out.
A face smeared sideways.
A distillate reeking of ditch water.
It is a man-thing dragged from a roadside channel
With one arm bent stiffly across the chest,
The other rigid by his side,
Legs curled like a foetus kinked at the hip.
Invasion is
One wit joking
That they could make a fortune
Hiring his withered arse out
To horny soldiers four weeks on the peninsula.
And it is everybody laughing.
And it is the dog finding it irresistible –
His dainty shy licking,
His cool wet nose nuzzling the creased leather-flesh,
And him having a go at it
Before anyone could stop him.
(Dragged it three feet before they shoo’d him away.)
It is the dog grinning and bounding and wagging its tail,
Joining in the fun,
Keen for another go
In next to
No time
At all.
I. Cruelty
Gold Tooth –
Who beat us worse than any of them –
Was a market gardener before the war.
He grew tomatoes.
II. Cruelty
Does it give him a hard-on?
Does it stiffen him up?
Does he return to barracks
And toss off under the blankets?
Brother
I’m worried about my brother.
He carries himself too tall.
They beat
