WEBB, FRANCIS CHARLES (1925-1973), poet, was born on 8 February 1925 at Rose Park, Adelaide, third of four children and only son of Claude Webb-Wagg, a professional musician from Sydney, and his English-born wife Hazel Leonie, daughter of Francis Foy who had established Mark Foy's Ltd's store in Sydney. In 1927 Hazel died suddenly. Soon after, Claude (who seems to have had a prior history of mental illness) lapsed into chronic depression and in 1931 had himself admitted to Callan Park Mental Hospital in Sydney, where he died in 1945. He had placed his children in the care of their paternal grandparents, Charles and Amy Webb-Wagg, who lived in North Sydney. Although Charles was not a Catholic, Amy was, and the children were brought up in that faith. A profound and intense Catholicism was to occupy a central place in Francis's verse.
Educated at several Catholic schools on the North Shore, Frank manifested an early talent for poetry; one piece, 'The Hero of the Plains', survives from a set of seven poems that he wrote at the age of 7 for his grandmother's birthday. After attending the Christian Brothers' High School, Lewisham, for two years, he gained first-class honours and second place in the State in the Leaving certificate English examination for 1942. He deferred taking up an exhibition at the University of Sydney. On 10 June that year, as F. Webb, he published a poem, 'Palace of Dreams', in the Bulletin; both Douglas Stewart, its literary editor, and Norman Lindsay encouraged him.
In 1943 Webb started corresponding with Clem Christesen, founding editor of Meanjin Papers. In later years he felt more at home with Meanjin and the Melbourne literary community than with Stewart, Lindsay, and the Bulletin school. On 11 May 1943 Webb enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He trained as a wireless air gunner in Australia and Canada but did not see action. Returning to Sydney, he was demobilized on 5 March 1946 as a flight sergeant. He enrolled in arts at the university but failed to complete the year, withdrawing apparently to devote himself to his own thought and creative writing.
In the immediate postwar years, Webb's career flourished. Individual pieces appeared in the Bulletin, and in 1948 his book of poems, A Drum for Ben Boyd, was published, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. By then Webb had left for Canada, where he worked for two years, as a farm hand and as a publisher's reader and editor. He seems to have had, for the only time in his life, girlfriends, to one of whom he dedicated the poem 'For Ethel'. In 1949, wishing to return to his native land, he travelled by way of England, where he succumbed to the first of many distressing episodes that psychiatrists diagnosed as acute manifestations of chronic schizophrenia.
Reaching Australia in 1950 in the care of his sister Leonie and a special nurse, for the next few years he led an itinerant life, moving mainly between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and publishing two collections of poems—Leichhardt in Theatre (1952) and Birthday (Adelaide, 1953). The title piece of the latter, a verse play for radio dealing with the final days of Hitler, was produced (1955) by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
In 1953 Webb flew to Vancouver, Canada, where he experienced electro-convulsive therapy. Back in Sydney, he travelled almost immediately to Britain. Crossing to Dublin, he was again taken to a mental hospital but released on condition that he return to England. There, after deliberately breaking a store window, he was committed to Winson Green, near Birmingham. He was later moved to Hellesdon and then David Rice hospitals, Norwich. The landscape and religious associations of Norfolk, the region of his forebears, gave him material for many poems.
Due to the intervention of David Campbell, Webb received a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant of £1000 in 1958. Late in 1960 he returned to Sydney. On 10 November he was admitted to Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital. The rest of his life was passed almost entirely in institutions, with brief respites when he was released on licence or, occasionally, absconded. Socrates and Other Poems was published in 1961. His Collected Poems, prepared for the press under his supervision, appeared in 1969. He died of a coronary occlusion on 23 November 1973 at Rydalmere Hospital, and was buried in Northern Suburbs cemetery.
Webb contrived to make major poetry out of his often desperate institutional experiences—the 'Ward Two' sequence, or from his English years, 'A Death at Winson Green'. After the early 1950s his interests moved to such personalities as St Francis of Assisi (in 'The Canticle', 1953), Socrates and the explorer Edward John Eyre. 'Eyre All Alone' (1961) became a vehicle for Webb's own spiritual pilgrimage. Other works displayed a fascination with landscapes and seascapes, and a passionate love of music. His verse is densely metaphoric, technically inventive, sometimes lyrical, always erudite, and often 'difficult'.
Questions about the relation between the condition psychiatrists described as schizophrenia, the sources of artistic creativity, and the nature of religious experience permeated Webb's entire output. Outside his work, he rarely achieved happiness. Yet he had the gift of friendship, attracting the lasting affection of fellow writers such as Stewart, Campbell, Christesen, Nan McDonald, Rosemary Dobson, Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Craig Powell and Alec Hope. Sir Herbert Read described him as 'one of the greatest poets of our time . . . the most unjustly neglected poet of this century'. In his preface to the Collected Poems he quoted Webb's lines depicting the Norfolk painter Anthony Sandys as an equally exact description of the poet's own achievement:
Fullness, shadow: what to tell again
But the so tender voyaging line of truth.
Time shuffles a timid foot, will linger
While the tired cockcrow of your lifted finger
Opens dawn and a worn album of love and pain.
Brown eyes and hair flow humbly from the earth.
Select Bibliography
M. Griffith, God's Fool (Syd, 1991); B. Ashcroft, The Gimbals of Unease (Perth, 1996); H. P. Heseltine, 'Francis Webb, 1925-1973: A Tribute', Meanjin Quarterly, 33, Mar 1974, p 5; Poetry Australia, no 56, Sept 1975, p 5; Prime Minister's Department, series A3211, item 1969/3169 part 2 (National Archives of Australia).
Author: H. P. Heseltine
Print Publication Details: H. P. Heseltine, 'Webb, Francis Charles (1925 - 1973)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 511-512.
{the above transcript as found on Australian Dictionary Of Biography click here to view }.
Selected Poetry by Francis Webb:
Foreword
We do not forget how to kill.
Our classroom is clean, quite old,
So demurely practical
And exquisitely patrolled
By so many teachers - by one
Teacher. His accent, occasion
May vary; not themes of his world.
Tamed, compromising, cold,
The Outside with its lightning and sun
Surrenders all playtime passion
To sidle through well-scrubbed glass.
Few foreign trifles are hidden
Under our desks, and to pass
Notes is strictly forbidden.
We can forget how to love.
The Outside we can forget,
The disorderly. Rigorous glove,
Buttonhole, these abet
The Within of hatred and fear
And crisis, who teaches us.
On their tindery pastures or wet
Those grazing cattle are not
True cattle, then, unaware.
From an orderly deck deal the fuss
Of panic - horns, eyeballs, un-nature,
An exciting story to tell.
Hate and death have a stature.
Love is so trivial.
Yet love may reclaim the herd.
Cold glass be shivered; for style
Is the century, yardstick: a Word
Cheats Greenwich and plotted mile.
And the Word was spoken, is spoken,
Reckless of tutor and clock.
Say, a bomber's precision of steel
Mocks the foundering campanile:
One by its like shall be broken,
One greet its likeness - rock.
Last laugh is not with death
For all the times' deification;
It lies with a lover, whose breath
Was, and is, laughter, creation.
Published in Francis Webb: Poet & Brother (Sage Old Books, 2001)
The Runner
Watch, and for a moment pace him on.
Clipped are the wings of space from him, and gone
Thrust from the hips, self-conscious overstride.
His face hangs yellow, curtainless and void
As a cracked window in a headlong shack.
Brushed by the terrible hammer of the track,
The little spider of torment kicks and swings
In the grey, collapsing bubble of his lungs.
You will not see so pure a thing as this:
Movement alone, with its own emphasis.
For God or Devil or Nothing burns and burns
This mystery. Earth turns and turns.
Trapped in his husk of terror, but alive,
He fights for birth; till drowned and negative
He lurches in to breathe and die beyond
The silver tape, the glass of Wonderland.
Published in Francis Webb: Poet & Brother (Sage Old Books, 2001)
Nuriootpa
Men with ancient communal brooms last night
Went over their pride and joy to doll it up aright.
Interloping box and bottle,
Some stray native head of cattle,
Were worried away or chivvied out of sight.
Cock-crow has called a halt: they sit them down.
Ready-handed morning, trundling about the town,
Dumps sovereigns to accord
Their labours due reward,
And such tuns of vintner summer as never have been known.
The hills drink; their decorous verdures settle. Chanting
Our brazen songs, from the haggard bus decanting
Our children, we look askance
At those gatekeeping trees' immense
Hands shaken in welcome - swarms of galahs past counting.
But the small, lenient hills, with a deference,
Proffer green flagonfuls to our wary sense;
Good English lies athwart
This Annual Report,
Beaming, brooding, chiding, and innocent of offence.
Foreground admits the malcontent, his bawling
Futile because they will fine him never a shilling
For brandishings of the torch.
Here the plump Teutonic church
Might stretch its pillars out and lean back without falling.
The swimming-pool, well-groomed but set askew
(For there is no excellent beauty...), with tattoo
And rap of ripple marshals
Whole sprawling vines and bushels
Of feckless sunshine into an orderly crew.
Five o'clock: we shrug off these cozenings, these embraces
Of the artful grape, we yearn for our rightful places:
Cinemas, beds-and-boards, lanes.
Nuriootpa is yet at pains
To light bravely our proud, heretical faces.
Published Francis Webb: Poet & Brother (Sage Old Books, 2001)
[extract from]
Along The Peninsula
I. Evening
The eye, really, holds still; it is always the mere
Skin and bone, flag and famine, love and hate walking
And passing, step by step:
Here is history, and we pass. But here, in one hour,
I have seen three empires walking - not of skin and bone,
But walking. Portsea is a small enough town
With roads and a picture-show, yarns and tourists and the weather:
Why should it be involved, this little organ,
In that huge red business westward, why marked down
By their prowling lordships on the hunt, all eyes, self-seeking?
Self-seeking. Self-finding, then?
Was this skin and bone their mirror, strategically placed
Between crawling water and the neon quandaries to the north?
I saw their invasion: no show of force nor loud-speaker,
And each, not as the sun,
Giving way without sensible rancour when overtaken.
The first was content with only a whipless chastening
Of some thin green and glitter, already compliant;
More avid the second, and shoreward, regimenting
Ungoverned yachts and dinghies (though in any event
These were aroused by the swell to no more than a rusty
Ritual chafe against buoy, hawser, and chain).
Stranded picnicking brass,
Sapless and bloomless poles,
Oarless rowlocks, whole or festering paintwork,
These were sworn in, refitted
With a grey past greyness for the dock, then made bear witness
On and within a sea past greyness
To the safe and sound direction of no direction.
Now the third, requiring no less than land and water
Completely to heel and paying brush-tribute, colour.
Our local Bay, unresisting
But gallant in a way, let fall the token of office -
White rampant, yellow couchant - while the game, weathered grasses
From their stained clay foxholes within nervous hills
Melted and slid towards truce.
Even the seagulls' last low-flying say,
And the lovers', higher-flying, and the usual assertion
Of a scamp of a pup, must lay down arms and echoes,
Measured for the very level
Law-giving of a doctrinaire star or two.
Published in Francis Webb: Poet & Brother (Sage Old Books, 2001)
Ball's Head Again
Saturday, your white-haired coincidence -
Haggard recitative out of one spidery throat,
Swooping drily always on the curt and casual air
Across a restaurant table - left me no choice;
For here
Under mildewed canvas of the pensioner's voice
The sick Head listed in a sleep without season,
Or half-mast climate,
Muddily satellited
By the wistful anecdotal walking-stick.
Hm-m, grown a little feeble over thinking:
Morning's whispered dinghy, noon's rhetorical yacht
Were spent homilies mumbled by a swept ocean.
Lonely, cadging old mate,
Three-quarters drunk, soused with blackmarket hate
For our week, our month, our forgetfulness,
But talking and talking, O your surgery was the summit
Of a dying. Have the agile young sunlift faculty,
The Head, carried on the back of its enemy?
Have islands, points, and bays
Turn cold shoulders, yawning a surf-denial, to their mission -
Tides and charities of waterglow? No, I must see.
A road, hard involved with the Harbour's will,
Was the road of my days returning.
While this secret house, always so shadily ritual,
Reclaimed its grounds,
Moveless coal-cranes contrived their nightly warning:
Wrists of rumour at flinching, defenceless sky
And paralysed old coal-freighter left to lie.
Now cruised to the roadside the Aboriginal's shark;
Here a man brushed death from his wits, and what this rock
Affirmed was at once beyond death. We have laid its passion
Within abject bounds
As a value; the fence cries out for a brush and crumbles;
But these cool hesitant lines, swift arrowhead symbols,
Will embalm a figure of truth -
The few innocent, infinite hours of a vision.
* * *
After daylight's overworked infantry,
Advancing, or tossed in retreat, upon their path,
Gave 12 o'clock sun's last word to farthest sea,
Was given the Head's creation. Strange ticking green
Huddled in its scrub; all its wind-wrestling grey
Laid open on rocks, kept the gaunt qui vive for the gums.
And strangest the blue, the spirit
Of its working, in metamorphoses:
Polish of armour for the Bridge of bloodless limbs,
And for Pinchgut headlong to rewrite
A monstrous history on tame water; but softening
For Kirribilli, whose raw new stones cannot quench
Her moss-draped recollection.
And strangest blue where the Head might venture to launch
Reconnaissance toward Goat Island: now
Those grappling ridges were lulled under the blue
(Pain, the brusque colours, visited by an art),
About the ruined Magazine. Leeward of Greenwich
This blue was near-white for the lawgiving and treaty
Of the Harbour's final hours.
Yet final the Head, with all his blue drama to court
And gently persuade the eyes of an audience, gently.
Rain threatened mirthlessly, time threatened.
O within this land a hungry eloquence
Tortuous on hillock, simple in cave.
The upright flagstaff and the leaning fence
Could hear it - even was lightened
The burned-out scrub by an imminence, called Alive.
All the hammers and drills of night after night,
The cross-grained rainfalls, the whistling nine-tail years
Stir up the shark on his rock. Let him cast loose,
Be filled with them, welter in peace or war,
Be twisted and turned, be lifted up and let fall,
Have weeds in his teeth at the end of a day's scavenging,
And come home with the blue players, as now in December,
To this old road and this rock-face I remember.
Published in Birthday (self-published, 1953)
The Song of a New Australian
In the hamper of a fictive world this wordy darkness
Is fed by the sick squeal of a truck moving
Onto a stage where friendly word means a weakness,
Safety hangs upon harlequin Hate with his gags
That are hallowed and hideous mockery of loving.
An interval - even armistice? But you only heard
A crate's bruising or breaking on concrete, then the last word
Of the damp, rolling, remorseless kegs.
Darling Harbour, self-fashioned, queer dogmas postered to his wall,
Discovers foreign all my words of defence,
Cannot have me in his black book, Mateship; so I fall,
Like the other thousands of mile-torn goods, to the phrases
Of the account-book, dump and stowage at a glance.
No relief from a galvanised-iron sea, and impure
Mouths are the sky-colours. Bridge is a coil of wire
Slung on top of some upturned filthy cases.
Published in Birthday (self-published, 1953)
The Yellowhammer
Working, tumbling, doddering face of war,
Fog overruns without thunder a taut shire.
Deft and cynical mercenary winds
Inform the slewing grey, the errant wheels
Into intrigue upon browbeaten hills.
Age trickles from the docile lines of lands.
Colours grovel, the soused logos of the sun
Lisps a last word from sallow wash and glimmer.
Cloud-structures of reason crumble without sound:
It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer
Will not give ground
To earth, sky, day, and night crouching as one.
To know the ancient ritual brotherhood
Of light dispersed and sucked up piecemeal, dumb,
This is the grey rat nibbling at the soul:
For all that urgent blood,
Communiqué of the hammer-heart of God,
Flooding the wizened limb
Would leap past time, go spangling into truce
With snowfall, small hour, toss the ultimate news
To frontal dawn from tiny corpuscle.
Plasma in chains, here no veins intersect.
- It is the heel of summer,
It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer,
Leaps of a sudden past the intellect.
Fog satellite, the street-lamp can but tell
Petty parables of the heretical will
Of power as conquerer: every yard's a swarm
Of furious atoms, bloodless, directionless,
At one another's throats in helpless harm.
We have known sober clouds run mad as this,
But sometimes the steep groan, steel-blue claws of search
And agony hither and thither scratched at earth,
Frantic to clutch the centre and the form -
Such fossicking could only end in death.
Outline of fog has no objective, clamour.
It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer
Continues on the march.
Wraiths of derelict cattle in a row
Moon round this muffled loiterer of a tree,
We never saw him so forlorn as now,
Arms asprawl to hostile nothing, creak and stammer
Pandering windward, off the living map.
It is the song, the footfall of the yellowhammer
Suggests trim elderly green, flagon of sap;
Yes, it is true
Even of such a ransacked fogey tree:
Worlds back, life cooked his supper zealously
And breasted him for certain hours with blue.
Published in Socrates and Other Poems (Angus & Robertson, 1961)
Morgan's Country
This is Morgan's country: now steady, Bill.
(Stunted and grey, hunted and murderous.)
Squeeze for the first pressure. Shoot to kill.
Five: a star dozing in its cold cavern.
Six: first shuffle of boards in the cold house.
And the sun lagging on seven.
The grey wolf at his breakfast. He cannot think
Why he must make haste, unless because their eyes
Are poison at every well where he might drink.
Unless because their gabbling voices force
The doors of his grandeur - first terror, then only hate.
Now terror again. Dust swarms under the doors.
Ashes drift on the dead-sea shadow of his plate.
Why should he heed them? What to do but kill
When his angel howls, when the sounds reverberate
In the last grey pipe of his brain? At the window sill
A blowfly strums on two strings of air:
Ambush and slaughter tingle against the lull.
But the Cave, his mother, is close beside his chair,
Her sunless face scribbled with cobwebs, bones
Rattling in her throat when she speaks. And there
The stone Look-out, his towering father, leans
Like a splinter from the seamed palm of the plain.
Their counsel of thunder arms him. A threat of rain.
Seven: and a blaze fiercer than the sun.
The wind struggles in the arms of the starved tree,
The temple breaks on a threadbare mat of glass.
Eight: even under the sun's trajectory
This country looks grey, hunted and murderous.
Published in Leichhardt in Theatre (Angus & Robertson, 1952)
[extract from]
Eyre All Alone
10. Banksia
History, wasted and decadent pack horse
Munching a handful of chaff, dry old national motives,
Shambles skinny and bony into the final push,
Picking up, putting down his heavy tuneless hooves
Girt with rusted iron, so tenderly.
Baxter is dead. Wylie, can you hear the Sound?
I hear large agnostic ribaldries of an ocean.
Evening in muffler creeps towards epic adventure,
To lull the blazing colossi of a blindness.
But suns will rock in my sleep, maul the moth-eaten pockets
Of memory for a few counterfeit coppers
To thump on the counters of stalls in a looted market.
Wylie, what can you see?
I see a flower.
Turn the horses loose. Out of earth a power:
Banksia, honeysuckle, forked-lightning-fruit of pain.
Motive pierces the cloud-scrub once again.
Swimming oversea, underfoot, the brawny light
Sings savour of this unique approaching night.
Stolid elation of a single star.
Banksia, carry fire, like the thurifer
Over my sandy tongue-tied barren ground
Wylie, what do you hear?
I hear the Sound.
Published in Socrates and Other Poems (Angus & Robertson, 1951)
[extract from]
Around Costessey
3. The Horses
The vegetative soul is the dedicated rhetorician:
Yellow knuckles of gorse are eloquent; motion
Is the psyche entire whose fullness is naked growing
Ungirt with passion or reflection.
Grass meanders intoxicate in green simple action,
Little hills troll the pastoral catches, allowing
Hosannas of Saints in sober gesture alive
As flowering cherry along a drive.
With the Wensum comes consecrated ordered Wish.
From weedy tenements the spying suburban fish.
Dace, roach, carp, dart or loiter with tingling gills
In subaqueous blackout, neon,
Discuss certain shadows, suns as wool or rayon,
Choose certain baits as tranquillisers, pills.
Plucked from his element, each convulsed dreamer beats
Agony for his city streets.
A phylum apart these two old horses stand.
(Flies conspire to transfix the sweating land.)
The pair of them will stand an hour together
Licking each other's sides with great slow tongues.
Minds, as bodies, are ancient galls and wrongs.
Flies would erode this hackneyed summer weather.
Memory, rumour, and an hour spin in the guise
Of the buzzing swarming flies.
He will give his body to the gesticulating
Green grass without forethought. He will lie beating, awaiting
The perfect town of water, going, gone.
He is the listing hulk or bale of straw
In silt of the inorganic; pang of law
Tides him into the rivers and the sun.
Light plays throughout his muddied floating things,
His action, desire, his gift of tongues.
Published in The Ghost of the Cock (Angus & Robertson, 1964)
Legionary Ants
The world, the tranquil punctual gyroscope,
Is more or less at peace after her fashion,
Broad bowels work, creatures rejoice or mope,
There is clash of interests in all dogged creation,
When silence comes as at noiseless thwack of a drum,
And look! the warriors come.
First shudder away the birds, all flaking, wheeling
Out of range and all forgetful of their young,
Crying at the ominous shadowy floor stealing
Over their earth; and then not giving tongue.
Now all things hold silent, and the surf
Breaks on beleagured turf.
They come. And whose ear can divine the awful waves,
Signals of command suspired by what demagogue?
They tumble in orgies of commitment, these black slaves,
All activity, but insensible as rotted log.
Their mad absorbed unity of hunger and mirth
Is the belly-heave of earth.
The wounded mammal whimpers and butts and runs,
Glazing, eaten alive. The three-days' chick
Shrills fear, and like a paradigm of guns
Anarchy gorges itself and life is sick.
Look close for a second, stranger, you will find
Blear paradigm also of our mind.
For this is our mind for today - never creation
But all nakedness. Odours and colours blent
And sounds and shapes, swivel throughout that ration
Of basic nerves, like darkness imminent;
But sometimes in moments of withdrawal one sees, feels
Certain subterranean wheels.
As their cloud progresses it may assume strange shapes:
Of devouring lover and organ, it may weep
Like mandibles of rain and whatever rapes
The fruit and flesh of life in very sleep.
Sleep is ever the enemy, it seems,
To all who dream these dreams.
But punctilious night now sweeps away all lust
On wheels, and another, a blessed, silence broods
Over many bones left twinkling in the dust.
Earth debates bitterly in these solitudes
Whether she dare replace, below, above,
The singings, ramblings of love.
Published in The Ghost of the Cock (Angus & Robertson, 1964)
Before Two Girls
(A Photograph of St. Therese and Celine)
The arrest amid capering dust. To the crowd they are telling
Some lucky parable of clear expiation coming
From the pierced side of a twisted Faucet, streaming
With ripples, intensities, and shadows. But all our dreaming
Was the dust-buffoon miming and wriggling and rolling.
Hungry-gutted cars
Acquiesce, sigh, and prick up their metal ears,
Again in the womb (or stratified): our imageries
Steam in clarity, charity, up to their knees.
If they have finished the dishes and are leaning
Together in some timidity for the eye
Of the box-camera to wink at them, knowingly
Some chinaware chuckles, It had to be, to be.
They forsook the amorous dust for immaculate Meaning.
Only to find that same dust
Swarming fog-silken, making faces in its lust
(But faces melting into pity, irresolution, loss)
All about the pure intimacy of the Faucet, the Cross.
For Jack and Jill, tumbling in the kennel or the stews
Take dust to bed with them under a consumptive moon
Choking in the heavens, or under a smoggy sun
And frayed counterpane of cloud. But the moon for man
Still goads the spavined panther, the ocean, claws
By proxy every coast
To reclaim for a flowering all that she can of dust.
And dust we become. Was it a whisper or a nothing
Came from our dust before His touch or His breathing?
Moist spot on the lung burning at compline, and burning
In the thorax of dawn: all deathbeds are gathering in
Around these two, and the rheum and haze of sin.
Darkness the sun, the moon. Time has begun.
For He is His pattern: one prayer, twisting and turning
Among the amphibious pleading
Forms and faces, compels the waters and the bleeding
Of His Heart: as for ever the mangled hands and breast
May ponder into flower the hot tumuli of dust.
And He is the slave of those prayers He has lent;
And we are slaves of the secular word, the vision
And the treasure and the terror: each little reckless collision
Of man and man, each sentence, facial expression
Alters forever a life, a thought: will merriment
Melt the enclave, the siege?
Will the Bank be robbed? Sputum or dusty rage?
So their silence is sweetness tiering and tempering the comb;
Or dust becomes pasturition; or dust is loam.
Roses on the streets, lilies on the autobahn...
Yes, the city must shrug its shoulders, go quaking back
To dust; and the little child take up his pack;
And the hymnal of sirens and wheels, under the black
Thumbnail of custom, loll open. And the flowers - a return
To the tyrant dust?
Or shall our dust have traffic with evening's mist,
Tears or saliva: the living on terms with the dead?
These two and some knots of stars pause overhead.
Published in Francis Webb: Poet and Brother (Sage Old Books, 2001)
[extract from]
Ward Two
4. Ward Two and the Kookaburra
We fingered the World, or watered little cacti of anger.
So broad and shrewd and worshipful, the Wall
Peeped with some reservations at all the riff-raff of hunger
And desire - much as the schooled and tall
Mountain or introvert desert might peep at a city
- The crude etude without art, pandemonium
Of living - and remain dumb:
But at dawn that shiver in the limbs of a eunuch pity.
And then the Yard was empty: snap of the thick thumb
From somewhere, and the moon with the lined face,
Old voyageuse, dined on her continental crumb
And sea-sauce, and then portmanteau'd every trace
Of knick-knacks and a world.
Or, friends, had each of you somehow jerked ajar
The quantum portal, like a star
Erupting into sleep's non-magnetic field?
Today on the sky's porous hulk there is unfurled
Naive bunting: very discreetly, arms and legs
Of light tread the greying timbers: and now this wild,
This lumbering giant ghost of laughter while the dregs
Of planets are drained, the cup shakes:
His guffaw like some coup of megatons past belief
Shivers our gold and copper grief:
History's bowels roll for breakfast as history wakes.
Our menial hands and trouser legs sweep in the brief
Gesture, the Fixed Idea; or time's complaint
Flutters in this air pocket like a leaf.
Arms, legs of man and colour crawl aslant
Unpausing: but the head
Of obsessed ultimate Laughter in ascent
Bulges into testament!
Gaping at your porridge, munch it like a god!
7. The Old Women
From social ellipses, from actual weight and mass
They are disembarking, from age and weight and sex,
Floating among us this Sunday afternoon,
Ugly, vague, tiny as the vagrant island of gas
Embracing, nosing certain unthinkable wrecks,
Sunken faces like the face of the cretin moon.
Son, husband, lover, have spun out of orbit; this place
Holds the fugitive vessel to be kissed; and the rest is space.
They wait in the visitors' room: archaic clothing,
Reading-glass, patois of tin, rigmarole hair.
Men like meteorites enter their atmosphere:
The bombast, the wake of fire, the joy, the nothing,
Known strata of repartee unveiled with care,
Ice Age of the cherished calculated fear.
Gravity bends to an earlier law in this place:
Comes a lifting of heads among grazing herds of space.
The grazing herds are all for a foundering
Old planet borne in the omnibus of the sun
Patchy and coughing in all its wheels and wild
About the roof. They watch her blundering
While gravity pauses, down to clipped hedges, mown
Grasses, ferrying pastries for her child.
So this is earth, the worn stockings in this place.
They are chewing and swishing, the startled herds of space.
They have missed her absurd mimesis of cosmic war;
Her rain of trivial shapely missiles; the pimple
Of the megaton explosion upon her brow;
Her deaths by the spadeful; her dancing orator.
Missed the man punchdrunk, grappling with a simple
Colour or stone or song that might disavow
His midget mother tumbling in metre, displace
The ancient entente between earth and space and space.
Giggling, squinting, with laundry, confectioneries,
Old women bear fodder for the universe, add their spark
To a train of time that blows open the infinite.
It is blackness about them discloses our galaxies.
Look on these faces: now look out at the dark:
It was always and must be always the stuff of light.
The decrepit persistent folly within this place
Will sow with itself the last paddock of space.
Published in The Ghost of the Clock (Angus & Robertson, 1964)
Acknowledgments to Claudia Snell and Peter and Leonie Meere for this feature of Francis Webb's poetry. Peter and Leonie are the authors of Poet and Brother: Francis Webb (Sage Old Books, 2001).
poetry extracts sourced from www.thylazine.org
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