Francis Duggan Poems

Dust in the wind is flying and the windblown pollen from the trees
It gets into your nostrils and causes you to sneeze
In warm heatwave conditions and everywhere is so dry
And there is not a rain cloud in the blue and sunny sky
...

A two hundred and fifty kilometres firefront is burning through Victoria East
Blackening the environment and dispossessing human, bird and beast
Clogging the sky with gray fog for hundreds of kilometres around
And only blackened desolation where it has been through to be found.
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I laugh when i hear them say God's on our side
And on our great achievements we can take great pride
Another war victory we can celebrate
But then some of our egos not hard to inflate
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Perhaps i enjoyed my few seconds of fame
When the beautiful lady she called me by name
The warmth of her greeting with me it did stay
And she surely did help for to brighten my day
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Across the place of stones and thistles known as the hungry hill
The harsh call of the kookaburra echoes loud and shrill
And down in the wooded gully the calls of the weerloo
In this the home of wallaby and the wild grey kangaroo,
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Crows are not good at singing caw caw is their only song
But those who say quite ugly birds have surely got it wrong
Their feathers dark and glossy have got a lustrous sheen
And they are very pretty birds when in the sunlight seen,
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The familiar sounds made by the male snipe above the bog at night
With wings and tail he makes a goat like noise whilst in his courtship flight
In Spring and early Summer him i often did hear
But that was many years ago and many miles from here.
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Their soft piping notes have a beautiful ring
And above the beach as they fly they do sing
With orange coloured bills and as dark as a crow
Their beauty goes with them to where-ever they go.
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Those enamoured by death who of immortality dream
Suffer of delusion or so it does seem
For in the scale of time everything seems to fade
And the dead cannot witness their memorial parade.
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So much for the patriarchal society and the patriarchal ways of life
The man goes home drunk from the Barroom and beats his children and his wife
And the police slow to interfere in such matters they see it as a family affair
Abused women always too many and abusive men now don't seem rare.
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