This week: Alec Derwent Hope Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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| This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady |
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Death of the Bird
by Alec Derwent Hope
For every bird there is this last migration;
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.
Year after year a speck on the map, divided
By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;
Season after season, sure and safely guided,
Going away she is also coming home.
And being home, memory becomes a passion
With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,
Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession
And exiled love mourning within the breast.
The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;
The palm tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.
And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;
That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,
Custom and fear constraining her no longer,
Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.
A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place,
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.
She feels it close now, the appointed season;
The invisible thread is broken as she flies;
Suddenly, without warning, without reason,
The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.
Try as she will, the trackless world delivers
No way, the wilderness of light no sign;
Immense,complex contours of hills and rivers
Mock her small wisdom with their vast design.
The darkness rises from the eastern valleys,
And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,
And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,
Receives the tiny burden of her death.
On July 21, 1907 in Cooma, New South Wales, Alec Derwent Hope was born. His father was a minister and his mother was a teacher. Hope was educated at home as a child while the family moved around to different parishes. He also attend some public schools in Tasmania and New South Wales. It is said that Hope wrote his first poem at age eight for his mother on her birthday. The family then moved to Sydney, where Hope graduated from Fort Street High School.
Hope went on to graduate from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English and Philosophy in 1928. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. Hope’s scholastic career at Oxford did not go as well as he hoped and in 1932 he returned to Sydney to teach. A few years later he met Penelope Robinson. The couple was married in 1937 and had three children together. Hope was appointed lecturer in education at the Sydney Teachers' College in 1937, later he became a lecturer in English until 1944. During the 1940’s he was part of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's Children's Session, as 'Anthony Inkwell.’ Hope began teaching University of Melbourne in 1945 and in 1951 was appointed Professor of English at Canberra University College, where he taught until his retirement in 1968.
Hope had been writing poetry his whole life, publishing only in periodicals. By the time he published his first volume of poetry he was already well known as a poet. His first collection of poems, "The Wandering Islands," was published in 1955.It was met with great praise for Hope's skillful use of traditional verse forms and critique of contemporary values and received the Grace Leven Poetry Prize. His second collection, "Poems," published in 1960 in London. Hope receive the Arts Council of Great Britain Poetry Award in 1965. He also received the Levinson Prize for Poetry in 1968 and the Ingram Merrill Award for Literature in 1969. Hope went on to write new editions of Selected Poems in 1972, 1986 and 1992, the latter sharing the Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award for 1993.
Hope lost his wife Penelope in 1988. For many years after her death he continued his writing at the University where they gave him a room and a fellowship. He published many other volumes of poetry,several plays and some works fiction. When Hope’s health began to fail he moved himself into Canberra nursing home, where he suffered a series of debilitating stokes. Alec Derwent Hope died on July 13, 2000.
Australia
by Alec Derwent Hope
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.
They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.
Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive",
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.
Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,
Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
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When the reaper man completes his deed,
let wine and music freely flow
in celebration of a spirit freed,
instead of weeping in afterglow.
Let wine and music freely flow
and dance a jig around marble slab,
instead of weeping in afterglow,
creating scene both damp and drab.
We'll dance a jig around marble slab
until the light of day begins to fade,
rejecting scene both damp and drab
through onset of evening shade.
As light of day begins to fade,
lilies' petals disguise themselves with sunset blush
through onset of evening shade,
because we are in no particular rush.
Lilies' petals disguise them selves with sunset blush
in celebration of a spirit freed,
because we are in no particular rush
when the reaper man completes his deed.
Honorable mention:
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These are the rules:
1) You must use the words I give in a poem or prose with no limits on length.
2) The words can be in any order and anywhere throughout the poem and can be any form of the word.
3) All entries must be posted in your portfolio and you must post the link in this forum, "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] by July 13, 2019.
4) The winner will get 3000 gift points and the poem will be displayed in this section of the newsletter the next time it is my turn to post (July 17, 2019)
The words are:
rain, boots, rubber, duck, puddles, rainbow, paper, boat
 Good luck to all
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Poetry: June 19, 2019 Issue [#9609]
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