The Afternoon of A.O. Neville Poem by Geoffrey Donald Page

When all the other clerks have gone
he¹s flicking through his set of cards.
Every fleck of black is in them.

How much the dream of paleness haunts him:
half-caste, quadroon, octoroon,
the colour fading, birth by birth,

until the housemaid¹s linen bib
gives back the lustre of her face,
white as flour, all darkness gone.

He knows he will not live to see it
it hangs there like a sought horizon.
Those screams at separation are

a washing blue that brings the whiteness.
He hears them vaguely from the office.
They never quite distract him though.

And blacks, of course, when kept apart,
implode into their very blackness.
They cannot fit this modern world.

Though often now he's half-disheartened,
thinking of his fellow whites
fettlers, stockmen, rouseabouts,

swagmen, fossickers or drovers
sowing semen fecklessly
between black thighs, with swearing maybe,

a little violence, as required,
a grunting, quick two-minutes-only,
breathing whisky, like as not,

and station owners, too, among them,
not just the riffraff of the road.
A wedding¹s whiteness will not happen

even if it were desired.
It¹s not there in the cards he fingers.
The photos wouldn't turn out right.

He fights a different sort of warfare,
white seed wiping out the black.
Some evenings though he's less than pleased.

His mouth gives out a little sigh.
He's like some half-breed chambermaid
he might almost have trained himself,

slouching in the morning after
to give her boss's sheets a boiling
and hang them whitely in the sky.