I DO !

I DO

or ( The farmboy's I Do! )

I am my own slave.
In the primary world there is no
escaping the menial others wage slaves for
I drive myself with a whip of ‘have to’
- an elemental way of thinking…
But I do

'Do you take this earth?' the preacher
intones. 'To have and hold to
till death you to earth return?'
And my solemn vow 'I take you'
gives small change for earth taking seed of me…
But I do.

No! - I want mistress of the moon…
Oh any, any, comely star will do...
Love me some other, other...Other!
Infidelities are what I'm brewing
An easy lay. Lie! Why stay earthbound?
But I do.

Rings? With these shackles I farm
Wild oats back into a soil manure
and the house of earth I lay up
shoulders my sweat the daylong. True,
weeds thrive, work is my curse…
But I do.

Wayne David Knoll © 1987

Pub 1993 in ‘Compost of Dreams’

Broadcast-Publication on "POETICA' ABC Radio National, May 2006 and January 2007

Written out of reflections on a wrestling of the demon duty and thinking of my farmer brothers and my father who farms on after 50 years (and still does in 2007). Feeling powerless in abilities turned to small account. Yet this is a small parable of fidelity in spite of other pulls, and even while wresling with the angel as Jacob did, asking for a better deal. But that can soon become the story of bondage and fear of faith. Judith Rodriguez called this a splendid poem.

Counting For Nothing

COUNTING FOR NOTHING

(or - The farm signed me )

First Monday of

every month
I must spend a day uselessly

in town
Have five coffees

with the accountant
From

Acres Accounting Limited!

We do-over

last month's debt reserve
Go over next months tallies,

draughts, live-weights,
And I get my orders,

with Guides for Futures
plus meagre Stipend

and Household Support!

Going in I drive

all the way past farms
like mine

-I mean like not-mine-
[Mortgages bought up
by

Acres Accounting Limited! ]

I took years

to sign to quit the farm
but the farm signed me
Left me here
with a hollow heirloom
a tenant for history

with the lemon tree

by the chookpen
which lets its bitterness here.

Here,

where there is no family farm
but the only life I know.

I am owned

by the produce I sold.
I meet

the bailiff of the paper baron
And he tells me

what to sow,

where to reap
and how much

of the paper

I can keep.

I am under

the screw of thumbs
a fate
which my great-grandparents

left Germany
to escape.

I am an untold peasant
In an unsaid feudalism
And all my practical thrift

and ingenuity
- that spare economy

counts for nothing
on economist's

paper.


1992 © Wayne David Knoll

Economies of scale now run us off the land and unbalance us off the human scale of feeling. Everyone but the very rich is becoming landless and placeless, unless it is a pocket hankerchief morsel of trod-on dirt. This poem was written after travelling through the Riverina and meeting farmers on the edge of the bank doors. It was inspired by a story in the Melbourne 'Age' newspaper. In the Campaspe valley I discovered the early thatched-roof inplement sheds, and straw-roofed fooder shelters of our past, of settlers who built with what they had to hand. The family farmers made and built in and of the landscape to make this land rich and more productive, more sheltering as a home, than it had ever been before. Creativity with landscape is a poetic ingenuity which gives many life. Whereas, economy with landscape is that mercenary snake-oil spin which also kills with the venom of its fear and sefishness. Economics kills the country; belief makes the country live. It is generosity and philanthropic stewardship and commitment which makes the country come alive.

Song Of the Weedicide Freedom

SONG OF THE WEEDICIDE FREEDOM - ( Weeds )

(After a return to the family farm and an attempt to turn traditional farming
methods into an organic and spray-chemical free one.)

WEEDS!
..............Thick Weeds.
.....................................Damn Weeds!

Weeds love a market garden.

Look at the rows of sweetcorn!

Where?
Is it a lawn of fat fan?
Wild radish?
Or a good crop of
Prince-of-Wales feather?

Sweetcorn ?
How tell it from Johnson grass?
Oh I see!
The corn does have larger leafblades.

What’s that?
Pigweed? Portulacca?
Looks innocent!
Looks like spinach!

All weeds?
Seedling weeds.

Weeds!
Careful!
Pull weeds sideways from the plants,
Watch for the vegetables!
Use you eyes to hoe.

Look! Here’s a sweetcorn plant

Watch Out!
EYES!

........Eyes.

Use the hoe like a razor on your face
You are the edges of the blade.

So! Raze the feather!
Slice wild radishes!
Cut grassroots
And bare the earth!

Only
regret
the weedseed
riddled in the soil,

Weeds come again
Again!
Weeds love a market garden.

Weeds!
Can capsicums compete?
Will beans be choked?

But... weeds can be vegetables
(Plants out of place!)

You’d grow them,
except they
grow themselves...

Prince-of-Wales feather
sprouts like headhairs

(be a good crop if you’d sown it!)

So, Pluck the young seedlings up
Gather them in bunches
Good double handfuls
Tie them with a string...
Call it: Greek Spinach!

Call it: Amaranthus Greens
Sell a few!
make some cash bucks on the side
WELL!

Tell yourself
‘It’s good to be in “Food Production”.

Weeds love a market garden
Weeds do well.

So don’t mistake scotch thistles
for cucumbers
when the soft cotyledons
first push through.

Weeds love a market garden.

WEEDS!
Will the sweetcorn revive?
Will the Fat-Hen that got away
in the tomatoes harbour too many slugs?

Are grubs
breeding in that flowering
wild radish?
Flowers?
Pink and Cream?
Pity you can’t bunch them to sell!

Weeds!

Feather spikes turn thorns
Your wrists take the punishment
Your shoulders ache

You bend
You kneel,
You kneel to weed...
HAND WEED!

You cut to the edges of your blade

And the earth you hoe
makes a new
Seed bed!
For WEEDS
.......,,..........weeds
.............................weeds.


by Wayne David Knoll © 1991


Is freedom from poison to a curse? Original sin was said to carry work and weeds with it in consequence. The weedicides and poisons of the late twentieth century come out of a fascist ruthlessness, seeking similarly final solutions for problems that we have to learn to live with. For there are also human weeds, but who is to decide which. Hitler's cronies thought they knew. The master story teller told of leaving the tares in the wheatfield till the judgement of harvest day, but then, row crops can be weeded with a knife or careful hoe, whether dutch or goosneeck. The hoe sounds its rhythm in ironic strikes. This was written remembering the consequences of returning to the family farm to do it organically. No environmental answer is easy. But the music of manual labour does become a song, and here is an embryonic symphony of words for that libretto.

Old MacDonald’s Prayer

Old MacDonald's Prayer

[ Against the great emasculation ]

I ain’t no Old MacDonald
no more
The farm ain’t got no
rooster
No draught, no stallion
horse

Just the combine
greased-up in the stall
And cloned wheat,
mono-manic
Waves from wired fence
to fence

And I, goose about
as Heinz mechanic
To wage mortgage on it all
Rendering my balls
to Caesar’s affluence

Ee…I….Ee…I…Oh !



1990 © Wayne David Knoll



A dinkum laconic voice rendered into verse. Caught off a grumbling great-uncle of a farmer out on the wide flats. Yet it is the earthier people who are left to cry the home truths of our ‘Great Emasculation”.

Daffodils

DAFFODILS

[The Magnifique Daffodil ]

Golden in paddocks that poets might fancy
Dancing in rows, splendid and free;
Dreams of riches from earth’s rare essence,
And need of wealth: prosperity.

Pickers must bend, quick-fingers glean,
Stems into sheaves, heads akimbo;
Bunches of pleasure for the shops and the markets
Gifts of God’s-country for cities below.

Masses of petals, the trumpets resounding,
Blessings enough ! Too much to disperse;
The shops are full, the markets are flooded,
A Glut ! The trade is in a curse.

What can be done with a surplus of flowers!
Might commerce! So cheap and wholesale;
Thrown down with the garbage, dreams to the compost,
Where gilding fades, essence is pale.

Back in the paddocks the rejects are nodding,
For green-silver leaves to idolize;
A triumph of nature over selection,
Like sideshow clowns, lampooning enterprise.

1985 © Wayne David Knoll

The Economy of overproduction is a scandal. Flowers of the absurd become a flowering of evil. I grew ”Magnifique” an early variety in what I discovered was a late district. Men are fools, especially men who dream, but Don Quixote was such a fool after Christ’s own heart. We have to plant our dream oats somewhere. So this is the nugget I panned out of those fields. The scraped skies of the city below are caught gob-open with a trumpet blast out of this marketplace bloom. It is my pleasure to fool that overgrown orifice with the eternal sideshow ping-pong of blooming asides of word.

The Poet’s Alibi

THE POETS ALIBI

I live in

a world of dreams

Where despair is transcended

Like a drop trail of oil
In Antarctic storms

Nursing vision, I range my soul
High up the lookouts

Drunk with ways of seeing
Climbing for the star’s perspective

Where the sky is without limits…
…. I can study men like ants

Crawing full-tilt on the treadmill
To escape the cry of trod-on dreams…

They would bring me down,
Enmesh me, overwhelm me,

But this vision spirit is above
Them… it lifts me beyond

And I soar up their yearnings
Crying out: “Mine!” “MINE”

Break the doors of the fantastic
Sprout wings for the vision-forged eagle

Scribe paths I see from my advantage
Draw a map for Vision to travel…

I am the maker of myths to live in
The rhapsodist of fancies

Unmuting the knots of tied-tongues
Reading the groans of our speechlessness

Until all our bones sing
Pumping our hearts fuller

Hitting the nail of veracity
To drive home the kingdom of mustard

Where spiritlife is free
And everyone’s truest dream

Becomes a life that
Needs no alibis.

1987 © Wayne David Knoll

Paddy Russell and his Mustard Seed Project inspired the mustard edit. The poet is hard done by, hardly valued unless you write ballards a hundred years ago, a hard ask. This manifesto of poetic freedom is a profession of a profession. It rose declaiming those who would stifle oncoming poetry infavour of the schackles of convention (lies)Or respectable moral (hypocritical) society and its I-you bound need for permission. I wrote those last words in 1993 and I still agree with them. I believe a calling or vocation gives us a near divine right to speak up. When the bishop of Canberra was asked by a priest for permission to do something innovative, he replied: do not ask permission, just do it, and I’ll scold you if you’re wrong, take the credit for supporting you if you are right. Oh for us to be the author of such an authoritivness again!

Upland Dusk

UPLAND DUSK

Pre-dusk deepens into the frost-dark
Gum trees die-back into silhouettes
With leaf-bunches, hanging black.

Mist smears of the stilled dam
Trickles from the fag-end, curls over
The embankment and sinks downstream.

The day-spent bush gives birth a kangaroo
Hopping down a clearing of fog-grass, its tail-arc
Waves across a grassy sea in a leaping rhythm.

Horizons up light - coloured galah - pink and grey

Silhouettes rub out upward and wash into dim
Outlines thicken, colours die, and shapes meld.

Only the throb-engine creek of frogs is alive.
Didgeridoo-croaks call up the time of bats,
and mammal-butterfiles play
shadow puppets on the sky.

The zenith tube which filled with light is earthing down
Fluttering grims touch down with stiffling kisses
And ancient mopokes two-tone of the dim.

Only Venus is the dusk-sun, a cold crystal grail
In the drink, and the crescent moon
launches its smile boat,
as if taking bearings
for the dreamtime.


1989 © Wayne David Knoll
Doctors Creek, Trentham, Victoria



The view from the verandah also became the view from inside the shadows. Facts went down with the sun, as if the sun-god was too small. The moonis only lit with Other light, and the grails of inspiration will beckon men to dream rather than to be real. Bit the light still beckons me to be charmed by an utterlast dream... a promise... that there will come a day.

Surface Light

- SURFACE LIGHT -


And then
the innocent moon
stood still
over the land of midnight
And said:
“I am the best of
all possible moons
I am.”

Answering its subjects
as if the darkness was a question
and the darkness was

“I am a democratic moon
one light for all
shining on this
everlasting night.

“Acknowledge me
Give loyalty to me.
For I am the best luminary
of the night
I supply you with phases of light.

So, we’ll make a bargain:

“You shall live by my astrology
like the seas;
You shall move to the tides
of my making...

“ Plant, tend, procreate
in my pale kingdom...

For a thousand years
of peace and stasis:
In a government of moonlight.”

“We will keep this one little rule

“ Let’s not talk about
the day
or sunshine
and its anarchy of light !

And the darkness seemed to say yes.

1989 © Wayne David Knoll

Saint Augustine said: " The world is drunk with the invisible wine of its own perverted earthbound will." The spiritual supermarker wants all shelvings equal, but astro-fatalism ad little sopy idealisms leech the truth from human hearts. What about sin? This tale came to me in a rush of inspirations hours after a sentimentionable debate with a overcrowded mob of new-agers.

Little Thornbills

LITTLE THORNBILLS

I'm happy now, I'm in a fine way.
My lot in life will not clear. Even
under cars I love my wife, my children.

I walk around the mudbrick house happy.
I did that! See, my new pioneering, my
garden landscape, the orchard. I did that too!

I'm happy reading 'The Age' mornings.
Wrap local-rag arvoes with a thawing chook
Doled with a little happy.

I even enjoy wheeling off to school the kids
Car a glass-can on oil-rubber wings
Gettin out and burnin fuel: zooom, zoom.

I'm happy. I quite enjoyed dashing
My lonely mug of instant coffee
On the big stacks of unlaid bricks.

I can even not entirely hate grovelling...
Like locating boltholes on the gooseneck
Of my happy towbar, if I'm down, (and I am).

I'm happy the car still goes (and stops).
The school letters children and come sunrise
Plastic lunch boxs must be happly filled...

But tell me why the little thornbills
Picking lerp off gumtrees out my windscreen
Make me catch my eyes?

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

I have twitched and watched birds, making birdlists since I was a boy. The little flight beings are wonderful to watch. Watching, I have yen to try. Where are the boltholes to be gone, that lead somewhere better than this? Pold the clod can undress the wings of his tongue, for who does want to be 'my man' ... 'Home among the gumtrees'? But it too often seems to be down on his knees in abjection that gets him somewhere.

Call Of The Wind

CALL OF THE WIND

The Wind
Oh The Wind
On the ear of night
it blows

The Wind
Oh the Wind
On the breath of going
It Passes

Sighing, the Wind
whispers of the passes,
of the path it takes...

"I'm a travelling
Friend, my friend...
On the breeze we'll go!

Gently tugging all ties away
In gusts in leaves
the desire to stay
Cold on the grounded hills.

"Sweeping on !
Sweeping on !
Are you coming?"
It sighs
"Are you coming"
It moans.

Softly, it
breaths it,
sighs:
" TIME"
Time passes...
......Time, it's passing...

.............. TIME ..................
... ......... Now is the time !

" Come, come"
It puffs away
"I won't be blowing
on another day.

"Come, come,
we'll a-whither go,
without weight on the earth
or bonds below."

"Come with the wind
and blow!
We can go anyplace
we'll go!"

" Come, Come,
Come with the wind!
Pick up you feet and go!"




Wayne David Knoll © 1988
Bridge Street, Trentham, Victoria

In 1993 I dedicated this to my children Timshel, Shalome & Dylan. It is so wonderful to break free of baggage, and to leave unwonted weight behind. There is a pull that also come with a decided push: a dissatisfaction with the way things are. The Holy Ghost is no mere zeitgeist, no seven-year itchwind of irresponsibility, but an inner voice, a call to intiative, to go with an imaginative vision of what could be, a breath of ingenius gift. And, Australia is the unpredictable land of jests and jesters, resourceful, wily, gamblers with God. Many of these would never admit to a spiritual desire. Others, others are religious without a breath. It is the forceful hallowing breath that takes out of our own rut.

Heartlessness

HEARTLESSNESS

In Sydney,
a donor - first
catatonic, then dead
- some body’s person!

His heart cut loose
- still beating -
bloody strong
as it hit the ice!

Surgeons lobbed
the good heart in
packed ice in an Esky,
battened the lid with metal braces
and flew it, ‘Express’ ...
to Melbourne...

They knew their thrust:
waste heart to be recycled
- come what who pays

- and in Melbourne
'Badheart’ waited.

At Tullamarine,
Police waited for an Esky.
Policecar lit the Freeway
blue with sirens on Signal 8
through Moonee Ponds:

Must short-time one heart
from airlift to operation.
Emergency! A man might die!
Pull all stops out for a heart!

In the Policecar Sergeant Duty
& Constable Geewizz
Surgeon Ambition & Sister Makename
nursed a metal Esky...

made a speedway of
the freeway not done
at END FREEWAY signs:

The wheelspin
made a heartbeat,
for the one in the Esky
in them all.

North Melbourne: no freeway.
Midday traffic! They slowed.
Felt the beat doubly slow.
Sergeant Duty sirened Faster!

Needed Heart for hospital,
Hospital for the heart.
“Shit Move!” Ambition cried!
...so Duty drove harder...

Parked cars sped past.
Housefronts fled by.
The T-junct came up too quick.
And Duty lost it!

The Copcar flipped,
and a powerpole came in.
In an iron-embracing
Gush.

In slow replay:
Duty died pulp between
engineblock and powerpole.

Geewizz’s armpit
was quarried all the way thru’
- by the scoop of a parked-car’s open door.

Sister Makename slumped forward.
Her door-edge-severed head
wired by veins across the Esky.

And the Esky still whole!

In a metal mangle, stuck
in spotlights of windscreen shard,
surgeon Ambition flinched...

Ambition shocked passersby
with bits of life!

Shocked to a single sentence
he bristled with speech:
“Get the heart out!”

He ordered the Ambulancemen:
“GET THE HEÃRT!”


But they didn’t know whose.

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

First published 1993 in “ Compost of Dreams
Wayne Knoll,

Fusion Arts Colony Malmsbury Vic 3446

Also published in 'Studio' Magazine 1994.

Rooted back in faith again, I return to the heartwood of my making. And I believe more than ever in the one Great Heart which increases ours as other-softened hearts which allows respect for the Image to its full tenderness in sacrelised humanity. But, this ticker of an action poem beats with something else. Written in Melbourne while visiting from Trentham, when a real striker like this happened. I think The News told of smashed-up emergency vehicle that killed a number while carrying a kidney loosed toa free radical in an iron box.

in indoor clouds of the soul

In The Underbelly Of The Air

In the underbelly of the air we fancy
Ourselves apart...everyone bit pea-princess
Gone-soft! Affluent and inflated with Care.
Insured-up to cottonwool our heart's eye
From eaglesight, the link-back, the omphalos inside.


In the underbelly of the air we have
Shagpile ninecluds to mundane on
Suckering ourselves tizzy in imagewinds of gorblimey
Frothing out the sails of our lungs to cushion-speed
Palming us down in cold heart-comfort soup.


In the underbelly of the air we sit
Stuffing images into ourselves, chickenfeeding info!
Weekending our souls on the breast of duck-down
Like fool Canutes at low-ebb on heavenblind sands
Scuttling our happy shit on the doorstep.


In the underbelly of the air we pity
Ourselves and tell each other how
Vulnerable we feel. Making ease and society
Saying: " Don't be critical! Don't be hard!"
In the underbelly of the air.


1988 © Wayne David Knoll

Where has our Vigour gone? Where is the Nous? Where Gusto? Yakka? Quiddity? All bowdlerised? Gone to gewgaws and hype, gizmos and dithers. We procastrate ourselves with distractions and make a world gone to cheap gawks and tinsel talks. Gone to schlock- truth and Newspeak! Puke lukewarm in our mincewords! Give us Acts of God and prophets to stir us out of spiritless comfort zones.

EARNIE - Crabbin in the Pie

EARNIE

"Me name's Ernie! Ya know
I only got one ear, one eye, no sense
of smell, no taste, no fingertips
on me right hand. One arm's shorter
than the other. me body's all scarred
under the tatts. One kidney's canned,
and I broke this hip; but I'm only 44 ya know?


I diced meself thru three bike smashes.
Lost all memory ov three years, but
the flesh fused and bone knitted!
See this scar sewn down me forehead
this brighter skin between me lashes ?
God! The only reason I', alive and witted
is me brain's too small!


I pranged five ribs rollin the fencin ute.
Took me fingertips off cleanin a sawmill thicknesser;
but me grip's took cute... I doan mind a drudge!
The quack give me the Ok fa 'ealth Benefits!
But I woan take it... I Reckon Dole-Bludgers ransack
this country... all soft-quid and sickness it is!
I tell ya it gives me the shits ta sit still.


I work I do! Landscape supplies. I yard-work with
one eye jussed as good as any pup! So? I've grimed
the dye inta me wavers! Them moulds gunk up
me fingers, but I doan shift fa fate, I'm in business
now! I'll be right by fifty... I crabbin in the pie!
... Aye? D'ya wanna buy some concrete pavers?
...... They look jussed like real slate?

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

A little horror story of feelings I kept to myself when I met this man in an upcountry pub. He was a true-grit mister in the acceptance of the limitions of his reality, but for me his wounds were as honest as his visionlessness. But I liked him for the fighting spirit he showed, and an integrity which eschews sloth and apathy.

humane containment

Song of The Plakiware World

All of us people

have bought Marie-Malt houses
and put a veneer on thing in the Old-Orchard country
-the rolling-green orchards billboarded on the edge
of town, around the 'Gateway' to the far-out hills.

We have iced-up tile biscuits for roofs and uprooted
Apples for flowerlawns there on foothills and spread table country.
We are wrapped in giftboxes of houses, thinking our houses
Among neighbours, jobbed houses and plakiware pantries.

We are dreaming about containment, going to happiness
And unhappiness looking over nextdoor's fence
And in keeping the sweet. Yeh, we like to have boundaries
Us people, and to live in building a plakiware world.

All of us nestle together as modular-mates in our votes
We are mates Australia, modular mates all of us lot;
We co-ordinate the look of one to the other, being
Trend-getters with eyes set for style, and lamipanel

Offices to keep the busy looking unoutdone.
We rubdown the instant pushbutton seal: ourselves
Counterparts to parts in containment and clark plastic
We breath shopping and keep mum in the tight air

We keep, we stay the same, covered up and kept
kept. But us people! We have out flavour-savours,
Our 0pinion-stores. We pak-n-store in facemasks
Of refinement Knowing our peaked bungalow has that

Vogue-sheer upline That panoramic motel-look about it.
We are going to doctors, gentling the wellbeing in pills
With many friends to host and become hosted among
Nibbling life's hors d'oevres from our keep-n-carry's

In partied-up backyards wired for touch and sound
with pickies of plump vinyl, our own subdivided platters
Luking the warm, swerving the sleek, making ourself a saving
We are the little people, snap-on, all-covering head-down

Bit-folk making contemporaries, in appearance a public
We have bought it, and arrived. We have made it.
We have made it all buying, ourselves, we have.
We are librarians of the containment.

We Know what plak-paks are, we read containers
We can read the secret writing of your plakiware.
The Mountians are behind us! and back us up
Supercool possessions of our naturestrips!

Crisp-pitted in cabbagehearted forests
Purpling up a pull of dewy lettuceslope, on footrest
Sprays sprinkling ferns under the rhubarb trees.
Paddocks cartwheel full with navels of red-honey dew

Tallpoles of sparrowgrass trees avenue Credit aisles
To the sheer walls of Hillsdale City with its castling
Skystack of plastic that us lot park about looking up
To great neon, saying: 'It's new. It's us! It's the latest!'

So come out to the suburbs of the old-grower's country!
Be baptised in vows of palstic. Committing Happiness!
Our plakcups over flow with irrigations of our blessings
Miming the pearlers of ditty just to contain ourselves:

......... Everyone wants their plakiware
..........To keep a little happiness in;
..........Everyone wants their plakiware,
..........And not an old jam tin.

Even you, brother sister, can get the angel badge, just
Dealing and being dealt, Always going to parties
Taking in the take-in. And for no real cash outlay.
Anyone can fit into the blurb and be applainced.

You'll discover with plakiware, the press-seal lid
On the sky holds a rich rich plakipearl as a link
Of chains you jointo be enriched and profiting,
Dispensing blessing in the Song of the Plakiware World.

1989 © Wayne David Knoll

Comfort Zones are our new fascism's popular compulsion. Here is a middle class lost in it's own pie. We make all our networks and then sell our souls to the fishwife of the market so very easily. I went to secondary school in the plaking outer eastern suburbs at Ferntree Gully just as they made the last moves to smother the early country districts beneath them , but I slipped through in horror of becoming another of the fillets of men in little boxes. The plak-pak sunkland is a soul-trawler's dream.

with black bibles deep in his eyes

Prayer to the Close-Hearted Father

Father, I needed bread
...........and you gave sin & guilt & shame.

Father, I asked for bread...and you gave
..........a sense of dishonour, self-loathing, ignobility.

Father, I yearned for bread ... and you gave me
..........neglect, hope-amputation & spirit-pruning.


Father, I asked to taste the Bread of Life
.......... and you gave me monkeys: blind faith,
............dulled sense, and dumb necessity.


Father, I asked for yeasty bread...and you gave
.......... sacharine, reproach, old curse & predestination.

Father, I asked for new whole bread...and you calculated
..........the interest rates I'd pay, threw me
..........the Protestant Work Ethic...and left me
.........with Quotations from the Bible.


Father, I asked you for the bread of heaven
......... and this abstact scripture is poison stone.

Father, I want to ask you... to give me
.........my share of the inheritance...so I can live
........ prodigal in a far country.

But I don't, knowing you'd work for me
.......to come back, while fattening a spirit-calf
.......you will not kill.

Father, who is my father?


1991 © Wayne David Knoll

He is most definitely an anti-poetic father, refusing all upcoming poetry in preference for the miracle of lies. God help this matriarchical patriach of fact-facing blindness, the religionist of sure method and money. You cannot tell him a thing he wants to hear about the work of lilies or the carefreeness of common sparrows. He owes the pharisee and he does not know how to pay. Christ was never so wronged. Here is a walking cemetery, seeing our humanity in tombs through the black bibles stuck deep in his eyes.

truth's kingdom comes in spite of flesh

Requiem For Mum

In memory of Laurel May Knoll - nee Jäckel 1927-1990


The copper-beach leaves waste
unraked since Autumn,
The rock-doves have flown
the aviary-heart;
Ground-orchids are bulldozed
in remnant bush,
No speckled thrushes
come this Spring to nest.

But May will resurrect wildflowers
for eastern Spring in old Europe,
Whence her pioneer-avowing,
truth-earthing forebears came;
And Laurel: pastors conceived her
in Stoic-conquest at birth,
And eight down-to-earth offspring
answer her High-hand the Rub.

Her distinction was to
rue false Religion,
Her pre-eminence was
to disdain hype;
She was given no Honours
but garden honour,
She chose to die
God's steadfast laureate.


199o-1991 © Wayne David Knoll

Mum planted a garden of love in the middle of a gross garden of money. She was at large as a collector of plants, and after she died her loved plants saved the money garden from grossing into its loss. She was a racehorse of distances too weighted with handicaps. She fought for us all to be faithful in faith freed from a great Emasculation, the twentieth century littleness of spirit. Hers was a BYO martyrdom. She lived breaking over borders, with character larger than life.

on the aromatic track

Aromatic Still Life

When Autumn breaks
First rain on dry bush
Gumleaf-oil-buds unfold
And eucalyptus spirit
Perfumes the settled dust.

The washed leaves
Shine, And I,
The human, passing,
Breathe.

My heart inhales, expands
To sense that elusive,
Ephemeral pherome
As it were true love.

Until the Track is a long room
The whole Bush a home
Of Foliage

Where the wafts
of eucalyptus are sculptures
In my mind

Like my infant first image
[ Being loved in soft light }
- Distilled to transparency...

1989 © Wayne David Knoll

Once loved, if only in infancy, even for a just a moment long enough to be taken in, teh seed of love is planted which can grow into a forest... and if rain is allowed to wash and water... memory of the High Love can be a life purified to wings of light and a sweet savour which can be given back.

in askance of the distance

Unsettled Landowner

The Forest comes in over
my unfenced boundaries
as I want no fence where
the fence needs to be
I need no fence which
will hedge my spirit in...

But marsupials eat my nut tress
Rosellas ravage the orchard
Seedling gums and wattles
come up in the rows.

The smallholding merges
and the Forest becomes my farm
in an unholy sacreligious communion
of pet sheep and wallabies,
kangaroos and tether-prisoned goats.

But the forest-wall is still a hedge
and this clearing-lot too small
for me to have in-fee-Simple faith
in arbitary boundaries and title...

I exist in heresy: not farming
the farm that never was until
I came. And all my not-farming
is diluted across the treewall
to the ever-grey of leaf ridges
which I need to slope colour
into the distances.

So I climb the big peppermint-gum
to a gumleaf eyrie.
Stop pretending to cope
with settled life
which fences me in a dull body
of one place, one view,
one parentage of mind.

Twenty embattled acres
are nothing but an itch under
the saddle of my want's
Great Dividing range.

But looking down I see
my feet, tangled in vines,
crippled in choiceless vegetation:
derelict snowpea trellis,
once superphosphated grass,
fallen droughted berry canes,
and sorrel infested daffodils...

and then
the half-clear
regenerating wildflowers.



1989 © Wayne David Knoll

The problem with revisionist history claims of Terra Nullius is that such claims give doubtful conscience to our lives, so maybe they arer the lies of a fifth column bent on taking power? Who has more right to land and place than he who turns it to productivity and shelter. This country of nomads is settled, but something, some question is unsettling our spirits from being here, growing in here. Which Crown has the right to this entitlement? Which country is my home?

I did the gruelling hard yakka, inched up the hard yards to pioneer a new 20 acres, but a failure to stock up as idealogy and liberalised politics took all my joy after its first creation. I seem to remember many sinuous esses slipping off those too-easy tongues, asking: 'But is that correct? Is that enlightened?" I was too influenced by doubt back then. I did not trust enough to the old pioneer wisdom that I learnt in childhood. In his novel 'Hinterlands' Robert Morgan writes: " But we gradually begun to push back the woods and make this into a place for people. It's the animals that do it it. When you have cattle grazing they keep back the wild things and make room for humans. People on their own can't do it." Then, I thought I wanted the wild. Yes give me the wild! But I have the wild. No wilderness is as savage as one human heart torn up from its roots. If I had fenced the place I could have gated those stray cattle that wandered in from the Forest, and had them by adverse posession. As my richer neighbour got them. Every seed of doubt destroys our peace on earth.

The Centre of the World

For Susan - who shared some true time with us and enjoyed being the mother of our children

THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

Late April blows in a foretaste of winter
drizzle
wetting a streetless, wild, outwardly
comfortless night
which drips outside doors encompassed
by Yahweh.


But inside ten-inch mudbrick walls it is
chesnut Easter.
Firestoves warm the hobs and uncurtained
widow-wide lamplight
falls outwards like drippingwedges cut from
an orange of fire.


Scotch-mist collects on the green-spouted eves
and drips
a splashy rhythm on the ironroof outside
gable sleeping lofts
where saucy air steams up from preserve-dark
tomato paste.


Side-splitting chestnuts roast on the milled
iron hotplates;
Real starch emerges through the slipped hours
cracking off skins
while children run by to dip from the basket
of hot sweet-conkers.


Flames spirit-up inside the glass of
the firebox doors,
while the milksap of heated chestnuts
pops and hisses
earth-wisdom and roast-breath up - through
the round-pole rafters.


There's homemade minestrone for dinner and cobs
of pearl-gold sweetcorn
daubed with yellow farm-made butter
that melts off the chin;
and the cast-iron kettle idles away on six
pints of raintank water.


So will it be coffee or tea? beer or a port?
Sit round the fire.
You can speak you heart by a burnished
silver flupipe
which plumbs this true-made space above
the centre of the world.

199o © Wayne David Knoll

Notes: this is set in the house that Wayne built, a family home in the Wombat Forest, near Trentham, Victoria, Australia. For Thomas Mann wrote: "But Lo, the world hath many centres, one for each created being, and about each one it lieth in its own circle, interwoven... deep into each other."

a plumline weights toward every being

we have roots in the toes of trees

Drunk On Lyfe

(OR 'The Alpine Longing" verses written out of the rejection of pessimism and doom-feeling when a plague of true grief and loss hit me for real life, as a despair was on my soul. Somehow, resolving the human condition with an affirmation against the unbelievers. Sung ironically, to the very end, to the tune of the old Plague song: 'Oranges and Lemons']

Drink in the sky, sip
Of the winds

Raise arms on the
Mountaintop

Up the clouds!
Up. The distill of ether

Nerves along
swift's wings on

Kosciusko

Ommegga!
ALPHAA!
Oennppellii!
NOVA HOLLANDAE
NOVA NEVER NEVER

Let thin drops
of Blue down

Your elbows. Sight
the breaking peaks!

Feel toes pearl
in your footholds

EARTH is
-----------holding
-------------------- Holding
------------------------------HOLDING!

.........and we all fall down



1990 © Wayne David Knoll

Notes: Living in declared love and too volatile in the jeopardy of life for the most high. I love hilltops: Muses Hill (Little Hampton, Vic.) Blue Mount (Trentham), Knoll's Knoll (Burleigh) Judith Rodriguez called this "a remarkable jubilation."

Compost of Dreams

FRONT COVER

This site is a revised and edited transcript of my book of 20 poems published in May 1993 at the Fusion Arts Colony, in Malmsbury, Victoria, (edited by Rod Boucher) ..

This time the original poems will be published alongside the footnotes that were orginally in the addenda pages. I hope to include the original illustrations.

The original book went with a recording of the 20 poems with original musical backgrounds. Maybe I can put up some podcasts in time.

Plus (maybe) some newer poems in the same vein.

BACK COVER

The blurb of the back cover of the original chapbook reads:

"EARTH IS HOLDING, HOLDING - And we all fall down."

"Drunk on Lyfe - A Remarkable Jubilation" - Judth Rodriguez

" Wayne's poems are so good that you forget they are poetry" - Gerry Holmes

" Here are twenty original Australian poems with musical soundscapes and images drawn by the author. in this tape and book set Wayne Knoll speaks with one foot in the country and one foot in the city, straddling contemporary issues and eternal truths, laughing for crying out loud, and with punch."


BIOGRAPHY

The original potted biography of the author read: " Wayne Knoll is the second of eight offsprings raised Christian on the income of the 23 acre family farm in the Dandenongs, where he counts six pioneer families among his ancestors.

He has worked as a fruitpicker, berrygrower, market gardender, lay preacher, marketing produce, been a new pioneer and parent of three children. He says of himself: " I farmed wanting to write, and then read myself into a wider world, studying natural history till it became a mystery, theology till it was a passion, and literature to lift myself from a Technical School shell- to hear the voice within me."