UNCLES who burst on childhood, from the East, <br />Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving, <br />And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost <br />Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving, <br />Bearers of parrots, bonfires of blazing stones, <br />Their pockets fat with riches out of reason, <br />Meerschaum and sharks'-teeth, ropes of China coins, <br />And weeds and seeds and berries blowzed with poison— <br />So, from the baleful Kimberleys of thought, <br />From the mad continent of dreams, you wander, <br />Spending your trophies at our bloodless feet, <br />Mocking our fortunes with more desperate plunder; <br />So with your boomerangs of rhyme you come, <br />With blossoms wrenched from sweet and deadly branches, <br />And we, pale Crusoes in the moment's tomb, <br />Watch, turn aside, and touch again those riches, <br />Nor ask what beaches of the mind you trod, <br />What skies endured, and unimagined rivers, <br />Or whiteness trenched by what mysterious tide, <br />And aching silence of the Never-Nevers; <br />Watch, turn aside, and touch with easy faith <br />Your chest of miracles, but counting nothing, <br />Or dumbly, that you stole them out of death, <br />Out of death's pyramids, to prove us breathing. <br />We breathe, who beat the sides of emptiness, <br />We live, who die by statute in steel hearses, <br />We dance, whose only posture gives us grace <br />To squeeze the greasy udders of our purses— <br />(Look in this harsher glass, and I will show you <br />The daylight after the darkness, and the morning <br />After the midnight, and after the night the day <br />After the year after, terribly returning). <br />We live by these, your masks and images, <br />We breathe in this, your quick and borrowed body; <br />But you take passage on the ruffian seas, <br />And you are vanished in the dark already.<br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-the-poetry-of-hugh-mccrae/
