here, yas can have a look at my poems if ya want...
www.geocities.com/jenat_lai/Poems.html
meanwhyle, I give you this... the ultimate in long! poems. By now deceased Australian poet, Kennith Slessor. Take a look at the second stanza, and the last stanza, it's an Awesome discriptive piece about Sydney Harbour at night. The rest is a long discription of a life, and some places in Australia. I believe it was voted favourite poem by an australian author at some poetry convention in 1998.
Five Bells
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
is not my time, the flood that does not flow
Between the double and the single bell
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells
From a dark Warship riding there below,
I have lived many lives, and this one life
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells
Deep and dissolving verticals of light,
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice Night and water
Pour into one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
in air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
Why do I think of you dead man, why thieve
these profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought,
Anchored in Time? you have gone from earth,
Gone even from the meaning of a name,
Yet something's there yet something forms it's lips
And hit's and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.
Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face
In agonies of speech on speechless panes?
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!
But I hear nothing, nothing... only bells,
Five bells the bumpkin calculus of Time.
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait -
Nothing except the memory of some bones
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud:
And unimportant things you might have done,
Or once I thought you did; but I forgot,
And all have now forgotten - looks and words
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales
Of Irish kings and English perfidy,
And dirtier perfidy of publicans
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.
Five bells
Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(as now you'd cry if I could break the glass)
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton and Melons and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes and how Tahitian girls
are brown and angry-toungued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry toungued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join,
So Milton became melons, melons girls
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something had just run, gone behind grass,
When, blank and bone-white like a maniac's thought,
The naphta-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in Darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five Bells.
In Melbourne you appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-pawns of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left all without use
And without meaning now, except a sign
That someone had been living who now was dead:
'At Labasa room 6 X 8
On top of the tower; because of this very dark
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed
Into this room - 500 books all shapes
And colours, dealt across the floor
And over sills and on the laps of chairs
Guns, Photos of many different things
And different curioes that I obtained...'
In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piery
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
Those funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, The flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, The waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died. I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or siezed it back, might I not hear your voice?
I looked out of my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackrel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
Now how about the crap you had to read?
