All poems – alphabetical

Here all poems are listed by title in alphabetical order.

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All poems by title

  • A Lambeth Garland

    A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
    This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

  • A Message to my Grandson

    You chose a marvellous morning to be born,
    The orange edge of dawn, the stars paling,

  • A Place of Meeting: Glimpses of a National Capital

    How name a capital city where kangaroos
    stare between leaves, past dome, construction cranes,

  • A Talk to the Willow

    When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
    You wept of course, but did the same again

  • A Vision of Degree Day

    The drowsy air, the throngs that gaze,
    The ceremonial stir,
    Mixed with the drone of Latin phrase..

  • Acknowledgements…

    Not vile, body, nor foe, flesh,
    Your joys deluding, triumphs trash,
    Fit to be foiled your every wish.

  • Address to Mount Bogong

    Stentorian mountain, resonant as your name,
    I greet you with joy, I greet you, I give you thanks

  • After

    Out of this questioning, eventual truth;
    Out of this doubt, faith rooted in the rock;

  • Air and Water

    As water into sand
    As cloud into clear air

  • Airport Departure

    My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
    with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
    unhurried through the gate of no return.

  • Alone

    Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
       While daisies spy you?

  • Anna-versary

    Anna is one
    What fun, what fun

  • Astronomy

    ‘The love that moves the sun and all the stars’ –
    When Dante wrote there was no telescope:

  • Australia 1914

    Gone away, away,
    Suddenly at a word departed,

  • Australia to her Children

    I am so old, oh very old, my children,
       Ye that are so young,

  • Autumn Song

    The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
    Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
    The dew in a volley of wild carillons

  • Away Day – Ten Years After

    Ten years since that incalculable day
    When from all worlds we know you slipped away

  • Ballad of Old Sox

    They’re burning Old Sox’s shack
    Just two weeks since he died.

  • Ballade of Suburbia

    I’ve never killed a Marquis in a fight,
    Nor led a lovely lady’s feet astray

  • Bamboo: A Portrait

    The bamboo cut to suit you from our garden
    Has become your favourite stick – dried and varnished

  • Banquet

    ..You they found fallen, holding a garden hose,
    Where, year on year, you watered, weeded, nurtured things to grow.

  • Barometric Man

    Twelve foot’s the rise and fall
    Of barometric Man

  • Boris Pasternak

    This death of a man, this sudden stop of life,
    Such total end, or such a faring forth
    Into what regions?

  • Bricks

    Slow in the golden morning sun
    He lays them tenderly, one by one,

  • Cambyses

    Cambyses is the name men call me. King
    Of Persia once and Egypt.

  • Canberra Autumn

    Land of the singing light
    Light that first I saw
    Eighty years and more

  • Chemistry

    In the summit song of youth
    A quiet quick catch of the breath.

  • Christmas Gift

    ..stamped with a star, but posted beyond the stars,
    marked ‘No Commercial Value’, signed, with a cross,

  • Christmas in Iceland

    We lay in Iceland winterbound,
    And heard the blizzard blow,

  • Christmas Tree

    You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
    The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
    The new-born baby older than Abraham

  • Colours

    Before I loved or knew you were
       I spoke as I had eyes,

  • Come Death Suddenly

    Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
    With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

  • Coming into the Clyde

    Part of me for ever is the January morning
    Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

  • Creation

    Straggling off the highway in search of firewood
    Past the tins and bottles, through the rusty wire,

  • Cultural Interface

    ..Three kangaroos, grey eminences, rose
    staring, paws crossed, with worried faces fixed,

  • Detachment

    …the thunder growling,
    And winds mounting, and the sky falling,
    And night, and you not here.

  • Easter

    I stood in the street in the morning,
    On a blue and shiny day.

  • Easter Hymn

    Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
    Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

  • Encounter Recalled

    Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
    I heard your voice arrive from outer space.

  • Epitaph on a New Army

    No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied
    To girls and jobs and mother,

  • Equal Rights for Emus

    Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
    We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

  • Extraterrestrial Report

    Arrived at the heavenly mansions, the blessed Saint
    (female on earth) was welcomed by St Peter

  • Farewell

    Fare well. We come to send you on the way
    we all must walk, so final, secret, strange.

  • Farewell to Skye

    Little death of a little dog
    In a death-wish world of news by body-count

  • Flying to New Zealand

    Hauled headlong starward by the quadruple conviction
    Of lion-lunged engines in their pride of power

  • For Australia

    Lord of earth and all creation
    let your love possess our land;

  • For HMST – 1994

    My dearest love, where’er you are,
    just through that door, beyond that star,

  • For HMST – 1996

    Now for your birthday the single prunus bough,
    by neighbour ’s kindness spared on a sentenced tree

  • For HMST – 1997

    Always a step ahead, you’re eighty-three,
    My life-support, contending other me,

  • For HMST – 2000

    For ever is the promise. I will trust
    To share with you the same light and same dust.

  • For James Ralph Darling

    In that keen morning it was good to wake.
    The sun that roused the swans on the lagoon

  • For my brother: Ave atque Vale

    Brother fare well, journeying to that Kingdom
    Of faithful servants, and of work fulfilled

  • For Nkosi Johnson

    His question ranged the echoing galaxies
    of empty cold unanswering space, returning
    home to our earth.

  • For Yarmuk, Elder of the Ulupna Tribe

    A worn-out body laid in quiet earth,
    Attendant trees, a wattle’s throb of gold,

  • Forestry

    My love and I in all agree
       As one, save this thing only:

  • Fragment of a Chinese Classic

    Catching the distinctive T’ang of old China
    She chooses for herself the character of Punctual Autumn

  • Fred Hollows

    Raged, raged against the death of others’ light,
    Toiled, fought, till sick and blind received their sight.

  • Genesis

    You spoke, after long years, about the morning
    That followed the night your first-born son was born:

  • Going up to the Rocks

    Knowing the time was short
    Yours was the instant thought
    ‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’

  • Grimy ships

    When the grimy ships go down,
    Down the river to the sea
    Dirty decks and funnels brown

  • HMST – 1999

    Six years since your last birthday in our midst
    seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,

  • Honor Mary: Seventy-Nine – 1993

    My dearest love, at seventy-nine
    You’re not, and never have been, mine.

  • If I should die

    If I should die, grieve not for youth
    Blighted, and towers of hope that fell

  • Just Coming

    Down arches of the years I hear your voice
    explaining serials of our late departures,

  • Last Post

    Heard how often, still the notes compel
    Unused to awe, we stand listening.

  • Last Stand

    These trees reached up for light
    when Jesus walked on earth,

  • Letter to Judith Wright

    ..apartness conquered by the power of love.
    Carry us with you as you journey on.

  • Life and Death

    Look where he lies, a clod of earth at best,
    Yet colder than a clod, for where there shone

  • Lines written in meditation upon the recent moth plague

    Moths! Moths! Moths!
    In trouser-leg, singlet and shirt..

  • Metamorphosis

    The young magpie, as large as either parent,
    Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

  • Milton Blind

    That dreaming day it was, the bell-like air
    Unclosed the naked admirable heaven,

  • Mousetrap

    With joyless spade I dig the tiny grave
    Asking, who made me lord of life or death?

  • Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto

    …Listening,
    I am bereft, lost in the mystery
    of music leaping quenchless, undefiled

  • Music

    He spoke with eager grace, and learnedly,
    Of matters strange, dark, wonderful to me

  • Music and the Heart

    Music and the Heart run hand in hand
    Naked over the shining sand,

  • Mutability

    ‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
    Said Heraclitus, ages past,

  • My nine-hours son

    My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
    Wry concentration of distaste
    To find your Person so displaced,

  • Near and Far

    ‘Eternity and time becoming one’
    you wrote for Daniel’s one day in our world.

  • Now virgin forest

    Where now the virgin forest reigns
    In solitary state

  • Omar in Stat. Pup.

    Awake! For morning like a faithful Scout,
    Has touched the switch that put repose to rout,

  • On Cathedral Mountain

    This mountain means discovery, since the day
    I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

  • On first venturing upon a switchback railway

    O mortal man, how fleeting is true bliss,
    So eager sought, so often seeming found

  • On Mount Franklin

    On the mountain-top, before the coming of snow,
    The everlastings starred the tufty grass,

  • Oxford Revisited

    Oxford! What change indeed is here!
    Where are the sweets of yesteryear?

  • Passover

    Between the tumult of crucifixion
    and the diapason of resurrection
    that bar of absolute silence.

  • Pause

    You are late coming home
    To the house we share
    An audible silence
    Chills the air

  • Pirates’ chorus

    We sing of sunken treasure-ships in coral-girt lagoons,
    And ancient casquets burst with weight of ducats and dubloons,

  • Point Lonsdale

    Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
    The muffling guilt of night,

  • Post-mortem

    When a man dies
    We find that suddenly there’s time to praise him.

  • Punt Counter Punt

    Mid all these problems we’re confronting
    I come to sing the praise of punting! –

  • Quiet

    Where wooded hills run downward to the sea,
    Beside a land-locked harbour, still and deep

  • Rain after Drought

    Waking to a diapason in the downpipe
    I peer through curtained panes to a curtained sky

  • Re-Awakening

    The dappled sunlight heard those airy footsteps on the grass,
       Rustling in the coppice and
       Dancing on the sward.

  • Relativity

    “Boy killed on Bicycle”; smallest print, four lines
    Islanded in a tossing sea of type,

  • Release

    As homing bird the prisoning hand releases,
    As tide, unyoked, brims up the beach anew,

  • Remembering Honor Mary

    For ten years following the death of Honor Mary Scott Thwaites in 1993, Michael Thwaites wrote a poem for his wife’s birthday (21st September), as he had done so often during their 54 years of married life.

  • Sea Change

    Down the cliff path, in morning sun
    Sliding, we stopped. The beach had gone,

  • Sea Waif

    No dolphin it was, but a six-month suckling whale
    gashed and shark-mauled, tribeless, motherless,

  • Shakespeare at Toggers

    Now all the youth of Oxford are on fire
    And dog-eared learning in the Radder lies.

  • Shoreham Morning

    The rousing sun’s sea-dance and dazzle
    Burnishes grassy cape and cliff,

  • Sleeping out in the Mountains

    The host of hills encamped around,
    The sleepless army of the stars,

  • Space Window

    Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
    Now half a world away, and hear you say
    ‘His music always seems like coming home.’

  • Splitting the Red Box

    The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
    are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

  • Stella Polaris: Homebound

    Above the great ship’s lifting bow
    I watch the Pole Star nightly stand,

  • Stumpy-tail Spring

    He lies unblinking, back and corpulent,
    first lizard from his hibernation sleep

  • Summer Song

    The Summer Term! What tales are told
    By greybeards of the days of old –

  • Sunday morning

    I wake to the sound of the chapel Bell,
    And I roll from my bed at dawning

  • Surmise

    My little son, whose face I never saw,
    Who could not wait to bless your father ’s eyes

  • Sweet solitude

    Sweet solitude, my supple slave,
    Delicious concubine

  • Taking Leave

    Ninety years youthful, questing through generations,
    historian of two hemispheres, quickener of other minds,

  • Tale of an ex-Static Water Tank

    Beside the Camera’s bulk rotund
    The impassioned prophet strode,

  • The Anzac Graves on Gallipoli

    You may not pass this place. Here you must stop,
    Though all the world’s great tides run heedless by

  • The Child and the World

    It was a terrible world
    And into it came a child

  • The Extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines

    Heavy at heart I felt that sombre story
    Close in a creeping numbness on my brain;

  • The Gull

    Riding the wind, in planetary sweep,
    The gull wheels on the radius of a wing.

  • The Honey Man

    Like liquid silk in golden eddies
    the honey laps into my tin.

  • The Jervis Bay

    ..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
    Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

  • The Last Enemy

    Could we locate the enemy of mankind
    (I mean the GHQ, the Centre itself,

  • The Old Convict Church, Port Arthur

    ..By a blue winking sea,
    The church stands in a green place,
    Green as Calvary.

  • The Prodigal Son

    The ancient art of story-telling charms
    The ear, keeps its first hold on men
    The whole world over.

  • The Prophetic Hour

    In this dread hour for thee and all mankind
    Britain, be Freedom’s fortress or her grave.

  • The Saturday Party

    The dusky storm and the grey half-light,
    The whispered word and a muffled tread

  • The Sun Ringing

    I heard a man of science tell:
    The sun is ringing like a bell,

  • The Tactician

    Spring held her fire
    So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
    Would there be ever an end

  • The Tunnel

    This is where the water hurries under the archway,
    This is where we enter the long tunnel,

  • The Well

    Seraph my soul’s content
    More longed than desert well

  • The Word

    The greatest word in the greatest book
    is that conjunction, ‘Nevertheless’,

  • Thermopylae

    The story, as now we see, was over-written
    By Herodotus, bless his warm Hellenic heart!

  • Timber

    “Up here the schooners used to come
      For timber, years ago,

  • To A. E. Houseman

    Full many wise old men have said
       That this world has more ill than good

  • To J.S. Bach

    Now, when the smoking ruins smoulder low
    Of what was Europe once

  • Tsunami

    … obliterating in instant mini-time
    a universe of suns and planets
    with or without their myriad forms of life,

  • Uluru

    At first it seemed a trek of migrant ants
    climbing the skyline of this great red rock

  • Voyages

    A merchant ship came sailing here today,
    Her timbers stained, her cordage worn and old

  • Watershed

    From this rock spine, not three feet wide,
    Rivers of a continent divide

  • Willow Tree: Two Years After    

    Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
    Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

  • Yin Barun Road

    Crossing the highway, furtive as a snake,
    it slips through bush towards indeterminate hills.

  • Yudina

    I praise a heroine of the Soviet Union,
    pianist Yudina, through Moscow’s gloom
    spelling a Mozart magical concerto.