Contemporary poetry, almost all over the world, faces extinction chiefly because people have lost their earlier reading habits. Human culture has undergone a massive transformation. Considered stochastically the print media might be actually receding; normal custom of reading books at bed-time tends to get replaced by the more relaxed activity of watching television. There is also some issue with form, more noticeable among others being the surreal obscurity of verse, the veneer of disjointed post-modernism, the lack of metre. It is however encouraging to note that there are poets who belong to the archaic and ever vanishing community of ritual man. Judith Wright, Frederick Turner, Mary Freeman, Cynthia Zarin have contributed to English poetry even in times as ours. I shall excerpt a few poems and let them speak for a slice of life. But they symbolize the spirit of a millennium that hosts human grief, joy, fear, or self-exhorcising creation in its lines.
| Apple Jack
Mary Freeman
Fallen apples bruise, the better for those Who prey on such, such fallen fells As these which lay around my apple trees Awaiting the invasion of the ants. Chance is, I like them too, and munch on one While gazing on this fallen feast, this manna From the sky. There is a kind of insect Not an ant, but one that bores inside it– Bit by bit it bores, the apple worm whose Life begins and ends in apples pending, Whose fall bequeaths it new beginnings there Beneath on earth where crushed-in apples lay; Pray my ending ends so well as these did, Harboring hopes of home within their rotting flesh, Fresh food for future generations; hope my Bruising somehow breeds a new condition, Rendition of my being. Like rotten apples Wormy to the core, let me be pressed out With a turning vise, squeezed of every drop; Wind up at last a swig of apple jack.
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The Peace Treaty
Frederick Turner
My neighbor’s cow has got across The green creek down below, She’s on my island, eating grass That I had planned to mow. And so I sit and watch her graze, And drink a glass of wine: Would that the whole world had our ways Of treating mine and thine!
Birth Louisie Erdrick
When they were wild When they were not yet human When they could have been anything, I was on the other side ready with milk to allure them, And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.
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