Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE AGRICULTURAL SHOW, FLEMINGTON, VICTORIA, by FRANK WILMOT


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE AGRICULTURAL SHOW, FLEMINGTON, VICTORIA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The lumbering tractor rolls its panting round
Last Line: Quiet lakes and milking sheds; 'fares please, fares please.'
Alternate Author Name(s): Maurice, Furnley
Subject(s): Exhibitions; Farm Life; World's Fairs; Expositions; Agriculture; Farmers


I

THE lumbering tractor rolls its panting round,
The windmills fan the blue; feet crush the sand;
The pumps spurt muddy water to the sound,
The muffled thud and blare of a circus band.

II

For this is the other life I know so little of,
A life of fevered effort, of wool and tortured love!
Why didn't somebody tell me ere 'twas too late to learn
This life with its fire and vigour, by brake and anguished burn,
Gorgeous and ghastly and rare,
Flourished out there, out there?
But I just sit in a tram and pay my fare;
Me, an important man in the job I hold.
But there, there are the roots of the hills of gold
That my clawed fingers tell.
Why didn't somebody say before I was old
That there were brumbies to break and these store mobs to muster
When I was bred to the clang of a tram bell,
Answered an 'ad' and took up a shopman's duster?

III

Here is a world that stands upon sun and rain
In a humid odour of wool where the sheafing grain
Falls like pay in the palm.
I but rode out the calm
In a regular job and felt the years fall by
To a pension and senile golf; that's the whole tale;
But there's another world in the white of a bullock's eye
Strained as he horns a rail.

I, with an unshod outlaw between my knees
Dream, but awake to the old 'Fares please, fares please.'
The long low bellowing of yarded herds,
The song of sweating horsemen on the plains,
The outlaw's mating scream,
Drought and the offal-birds,
Yellowing lemons and longed-for rains --
That was the dream.

IV

Here Science like a helpful angel lifts
The drag, straightens the backs and shortens shifts;
While in the town
Men are the engine's slaves
And, drunk with Science, pull the lever down
And stagger into fragmentary graves.

The tractors pant their tract,
The combs of the reapers thrust
Their yielding paths and the stooks are stacked
While clumsy thumbs adjust
The flayer's beating thongs
And evening with tired songs
Sinks down upon the dust.
What load do the geldings carry?
What load do the bullocks drag
Worse than the loads of fear that harry
The city salesman with his bag?
Salesmen and bullocks stagger in the chains
And their red nostrils snuffle at the dust,
Lashed through life and death in the frightful lust
Of urgency that coils in men's mad brains.

V

For there are many worlds to taunt our faith;
The fabled cattle-hills, the green wool-plains;
But fair or fabulous, fact or thin as a wraith
All drift into feverish sums of losses and gains.

Man's god is what he gets his living by;
No doubt this nuzzling litter of auburn swine
Came like an old Venetian argosy
Laden with all the elegant stuffs
For shining hose and scented ruffs,
Its bellying topsails gleaming in the sun
Along the horizon line --
To some bush-whiskered father of a run.

This lustful stallion, Pegasus without wings,
Is a feather-legged temple in a desert place;
This sleek ring-nostrilled bull is King of Kings,
And doe-eyed Jerseys mumble Heaven's grace.

The cloying odour of the milking sheds,
The docking days, the branding days, perchance
The springing pasterns of the thoroughbreds
Are all mere counters of deliverance.

VI

Many the urgent calls of the cocky's day;
What of his play?
'Within,' the Mongolian Giant is on sight --
And here's his boot to whet the appetite.
The spruiker with his flowery talk enjoins
Me and my likes to view the abortive things
That nestle under the marquee's greasy wings --
A patient, worn-out woman collects the coins.

Not tired snakes nor dancing dogs,
Nor green and human frogs,
Nor ladies bearded or fat,
Nor shark nor seven-teated cow,
Nor feat of horsemanship
Could stir a calm like that,
Put a white tremor on her lip
Or raise the cynically disillusioned brow.
Worn out no doubt is she
With the joy of looking, free,
Too long at each inane monstrosity
Till there's no more wonder
On earth or under
The sea.
But wayback Dan closes a week's carouse
With one long, sixpenny look at a three-tailed mouse.

VII

I've heard the waggon-wheels grinding by ruts and stumps
Scouring the black night for a possible camp;
I've watched the breeching flop on the horses' rumps
In the green light of a wavering bottle-lamp.
And I have come at last on a sweet home and a bed
And woke to see through the broken blind a munching cow at the bail,
To hear, while the magpies yodelled in the slow dawn's
searching spread,
The sharp spurt of the milk into the pail.

VIII

The things of the body pass,
And these are of the day;
The things that nourish
The body flourish
In weather and sun
But soon, like flowers, they're done
And leave no husk.
But the mind's things pass
Not readily away;
The mind goes like a camel in the dusk
Nibbling the grass
Between the stones of the tombs
Or gorging among the sheaves
Of blotted leaves
That fall from the housed looms.
So while the aeons run
Hearts leap and brains contrive;
Honey is of the sun
But there's no sun in the hive.

IX

The morning pastures of the spirit spread
Their dewy carpets for anointed feet,
But the lashed herd and the shearing shed,
These are man's clothes and meat.
For there are many worlds to plague our hopes,
Crumbling owl-haunted belfries of 'perhaps,'
And lantern-lighted alleys whence the stranger gropes
His way to the Andean slopes,
And the old stone stairs of faith scooped out by a myriad feet,
Green at the base, where timeless water laps.
Though there are many worlds, none is complete.

X

For all the yellowing melons of marvellous size,
And dogs that pen their sheep from the drover's eyes,
And the hew and thew
Of the beanstalk axemen climbing to the blue,
We all turn homeward dusty and overcast
By a sense of cattle-hills without a name;
Carrying bags of samples of the vast
Uncomprehended regions whence they came.
Drenched with the colour of unexperienced days
We go our different ways;
Stallions loose on the plains; apples of Hesperides;
Quiet lakes and milking sheds; 'Fares please, fares please.'





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