Sunday, August 10, 2014

In lieu of a Sunday meditation ...

The pond being pressed for time and out and about on Sunday business, and Judith Wright featuring in the correspondence, this in lieu of brooding about angry Sydney Anglicans and wicked Islamic and Catholic and Zionist fundamentalists:



Having known war and peace 
and loss and finding, 
I drink my coffee and wait 
for the sun to rise, 

With kitchen swept, cat fed, 
the day will quiet, 
I taste my fifty years 
here in the cup. 

Outside the green birds come 
for bread and water. 
Their wings wait for the sun 
to show their colours. 

 I'll show my colours too. 
Though we've polluted 
even this air I breathe 
And spoiled green earth; 

though, granted life or death, 
death's what we're chosing, 
and though these years we live 
scar flesh and mind, 

still, as the sun comes up 
bearing my birthday, 
having met time and love 
I raise my cup - 

 dark, bitter, neutral, clean, 
sober as the morning - 
to all I've seen and known - 
to this new sun.

Actually they come for the wild, exhilarating, intoxicating taste of cherry blossom, but they too, like decent paganists everywhere, raise their cup to the new sun ... even on a cloudy day ...

11 comments:

  1. Bolt apparently abused Mike Carlton yet again on his show this morning. Carlton's response...

    "As always, couldn't give a stuff about Blot's ravings. Never read, never watch. He's a fart on a tram - nasty, but of no consequence."

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  2. Well now that the mood's been broken, how's this for a bit of angry Anglicanism: http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/living-with-the-enemy-on-sbs-puts-gay-couple-priest-under-same-roof/story-e6frfmyi-1227013112624

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  3. Well, to try and change the mood, there some lal-time Hollywood greats on GEM movies today. Cooper, Lancaster, Douglas, Mitchum.

    Don't make 'em like that anymore.

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    1. Cooper is to be celebrated for High Noon and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Friendly Persuasion is also excellent. Lancaster for his real circus antics and for Elmer Gantry and The Swimmer and From Here to Eternity.

      That's enough for the great movies.

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    2. Anyone who likes Elmer Gantry can enter the hallowed halls of the secularist righteous and justified in the eyes of the long absent lord ...

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    3. Thanks DP. A great film.

      Watching 'The Way West' right now, which is a bit cheesy and full of cliches, but has some great lines. "A man's soul can be small or large, but sometimes it can grow to be great as this continent."

      And I forgot to mention Widmark and a young Sally Field as the sex-starved teenager.

      And Lancaster's pirate movies preceded "Pirate of the Caribbean" by more than 40 years.

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    4. And you must watch Mitchum in 'The Big Sleep'. A film noir classic in both it's versions.

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    5. While we're on westerns and over-looking the usuals, the Fords and the Hawks, etc and as per above, the pond has a soft spot for the Budd Boettichers and the Anthony Manns in the 1950s, and the two Monte Hellmans, Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting, that he shot for two and sixpence in the 1960s. Indoctrinated by a father who feared horses as much as he feared guns ...

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    6. Eastwood's early Westerns are crap, but it's interesting to watch his rise to greatness, even achieving a semi-religious tone in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. Reminds me of Johnny Cash 'When the Man Comes Around.'

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA

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  4. I love your blog, particularly Sunday Meditation. I am so glad you chose to publish the post you did this morning because I took myself off to see the movie Calvary and found it powerful and harrowing. I don't think I could have handled reading about Angry Anglicans after watching that movie. Cherry blossoms were perfect. By the way...I love the way Mike Carlton thinks...he thinks!

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  5. As a belated addition to your meditation and inspired by your Judith Wright poem ... In my younger days I attended a rally at the Opera House in 1974 to save Gough against the machinations of the Liberal-Country Party-DLP controlled Senate. It was an inspirational day, the artistic community drawing deep to support a political hero.

    The highlight for me was seeing and hearing Patrick White and Judith Wright speak. Both great writers from landed gentry backgrounds and both very concerned about this assault on our democracy. Gough survived that one.

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