I thought I'd post a favorite poem every day. Here's the first:
Transmigration
The cliff is edged with dark-green
Pale-flowered sea rosemary
And the warm scent of lantana
And the cold breath of the sea
Blend in the strange enchantment
Of my earliest memory.
My eyes through sleep and sunlight
Swerve with the gulls that go
Harsh-voiced in shining beauty,
Bright on the airs that blow
Between the bare green hill above
And the crashing blue below.
In the short grass the magpies
With sidelong glance step by,
Converse with gurgling laughter
And wild and lovely cry
And their friends from the red ploughland
Lilting and far reply.
My body is a dull thing
And a weariness to me
And here perhaps I could leave it
By the sweet sea rosemary,
Long and still in the sunny grass
While my soul as a bird went free.
Never to see a town again,
Work or wear clothes or vote,
But have instead a magpie's
Bold eye and glossy coat
And waterfalls and morning sun
And the full moon in my throat.
But ah, the long slide down the wind
When the blue nor'-easter blows,
The quick turn in the bursting spray
Only the white gull knows!
And who will say a golden voice
Is a better thing than those.
To choose between two heavens
Would take a stronger head
Than mine, which solves no problems
But bids me, when all's said
Lift up the same old weight of flesh
And take it to be fed.
Nan McDonald
I am posting this from work, and any notes that follow are from memory, so apologies for any vagueness. I am slowly working on a handset volume of Nan's poetry so have the poems but not the background notes with me.
Nan McDonald was an Australian poet born in the 1920s who died in the 1970s. She lived in the Wollongong area and commuted to central Sydney for her job as a editor for Angus & Robertson. She was very shy, very thoughtful, and her poems deal with themes of nature, birds, faith, bushwalking, death and the simple pleasures of just being. She lost a brother in WWII in Crete [no! see first comment below, many thanks for that correction. Being lost in Crete sounds stressful but picturesque]. She was good friends with the poet Francis Webb.
She's largely been forgotten in the annals of Australian poetry, but I like to think of her as an "Eva Cassidy" sort of figure, and hopefully with a bit of love and care I can produce a book that does justice to the simple beauty of her outlook on life.
Postscript
Poem taken from Nan McDonald: Pacific Sea (Sydney: Angus & Robertson: 1947).
