Four poems by Hal Colebatch:
1. “Autumn Morning”
2. “Dinghy Sailing”
3. “Weeding the Garden by Moonlight”
4. “Climbing”
Autumn Morning
The jetty is deserted in the sun. Warm light
streams to the river-bed, catching
the lines of feeding fish, bright
on the warm sand, seen clearly through
unruffled water, their movements matching
the slow currents, threading the new
growth over tyres, cables, cans, all shown
lying still in growing weed, changing fast
into the stuff of the river. Bars of gold sun
fall on them, holding the shrimps, the mussel shells,
the lives all overlooked. Martins dart past
to their nests under the boarding. The morning smells
of sea air, and new-mown grass, as ripples run
on this calm day. Even those cans and tyres
are full of life, each harbours its own crew
of living things. Ripples like cool fires
wander the sunlit surface, lines blown
by some unfelt wind. At the shore a few
people are wading. A few dogs and children run
on nearby grass. Over its little commonwealth of lives
of the hardly interesting, the marginal, the small,
the hardly beautiful, itself part of them all
and happily ignored, where so much thrives
the jetty stands deserted in the sun.
from The Light River
© Hal Colebatch
Dinghy Sailing
It must be hard to sail a boat without wonder,
a pure, childlike wonder at small things:
the colours of shallows over mud-banks, the wings
of cormorants drying on spit-posts, crabs going under
rocks, or simply blue, spray and a sail full of air.
And it is impossible to sail without knowing
of breaking-strains, and that just so much wind
can capsize a dinghy, and that nowhere
for all the simple beauty and all the showing
of freedom, is there any smallest estuary you can blind
with non-science, or lie to. Therefore when
I see men sailing dinghies there seem to be
with them and whispering at the last edge of the sea
clear shadows of much earlier men.
from The Light River
© Hal Colebatch
Weeding the Garden by Moonlight
I have barely started these nocturnal labours
when the local cats come: first the neighbours’
fluffy white kitten bumps me with her nose.
Ginger Sheba, a ghost tiger, weaves and flows
between the stalks, and little black Felix
stares down from the eaves as Calico One licks
and preens against my legs and hand.
What is it brings this multi-coloured little band
of pirates and cupboard-lovers in the moon-glow
to watch me weed? What fascinates them so?
They put aside their complex games and stare
at what I do, moon-eyed like lynxes in some lair.
Is there some echo of Eden in this scene:
animals watching a man make things as they might have been?
from The Light River
© Hal Colebatch
Climbing
The German battleship Tirpitz capsized after being bombed in a Norwegian fjord late in World War II. Several hundred of the crew perished in the upturned hull. About 85 climbed up through the ship to the inner bottom, and were rescued.
Upward. Freezing we climb in this freezing dark,
upward between torn steel as batteries die,
between the whittering waterfalls, the stark
madness that rushes from the steel inverted sky.
How can we be under these black steel facts?
How can we think upon our coming home
in this madness of oil and ice and cataracts,
black but for mincing pin-points in the rush of foam?
In this smashed world, this torn empire
off uniform steel and iron, moulded men?
Climb now, between the hammer-strokes
of falling machinery, between men dying again
in shut, filling compartments, with rolling steel
- this is a second death, this black freezing time,
when all is destroyed, save flickering lights that feel
the freezing waterfalls and weep and climb.
Climb. Upward and climb. Grip oily icy steel,
grip now and climb and think and do not think.
Hope and despair are one, with us who hold
now after Judgement Day, now fallen past any brink.
Upward. We must simply starkly hold
what resources we have, between with waterfalls.
Survive. Survive the oil and fire and cold,
the clanging blackness where the last madness calls.
Through each next hatchway to the crazed black sky
of armoured steel that seals us freezing down
under these roaring waterfalls. So we will try
as machinery falls and one by one we drown.
We are already dead. We have no wreaths or sagas,
or know what fire or waves may roll above the steel.
Our world is gone to ruin, our world is crushed
to black freezing oil, to water we now hardly feel
fingering our ankles and heels as we climb,
clutching us back. But we may not admit we are dead
who are caught in this black Hell outside of time
If we have died, can we think on what lies ahead?
To climb. Only to climb up through this dark
leaderless, driven towards a desperate goal
with barely pride and courage, with one bare hope:
In a wrecked world, we will keep something whole.
from The Light River
© Hal Colebatch
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