Poems by Kenneth Slessor

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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City Nightfall

SMOKE upon smoke; over the stone lips

Of chimneys bleeding, a darker fume descends.

Night, the old nun, in voiceless pity bends

To kiss corruption, so fabulous her pity.

All drowns in night. Even the lazar drowns

In earth at last, and rises up afresh,

Married to dust with an Infanta's flesh—

So night, like earth, receives this poisoned city,

by Kenneth Slessor

Cannibal Street

"BUY, who'll buy," the pedlar sings,

"Bones of beggars, loins of kings,

Ribs of murder, haunch of hate,

And Beauty's head on a butcher's plate!"

Hook by hook, on steaming stalls,

The hero hangs, the harlot sprawls;

For Helen's flesh, in such a street,

Is only a kind of dearer meat.

by Kenneth Slessor

Crow Country

GUTTED of station, noise alone,

The crow's voice trembles down the sky

As if this nitrous flange of stone

Wept suddenly with such a cry;

As if the rock found lips to sigh,

The riven earth a mouth to moan;

But we that hear them, stumbling by,

Confuse their torments with our own.

by Kenneth Slessor

Polarities

SOMETIMES she is like sherry, like the sun through a vessel of glass,

Like light through an oriel window in a room of yellow wood;

Sometimes she is the colour of lions, of sand in the fire of noon,

Sometimes as bruised with shadows as the afternoon.

Sometimes she moves like rivers, sometimes like trees;

Or tranced and fixed like South Pole silences;

Sometimes she is beauty, sometimes fury, sometimes neither,

Sometimes nothing, drained of meaning, null as water.

by Kenneth Slessor

Gulliver

I'LL kick your walls to bits, I'll die scratching a tunnel,

If you'll give me a wall, if you'll give me a simple stone,

If you'll do me the honour of a dungeon—

Anything but this tyranny of sinews.

Lashed with a hundred ropes of nerve and bone

I lie, poor helpless Gulliver,

In a twopenny dock for the want of a penny,

Tied up with stuff too cheap, and strings too many.

by Kenneth Slessor

Vesper-Song Of The Reverend Samuel Marsden

MY cure of souls, my cage of brutes,

Go lick and learn at these my boots!

When tainted highways tear a hole,

I bid my cobbler welt the sole.

O, ye that wear the boots of Hell,

Shall I not welt a soul as well?

O, souls that leak with holes of sin,

Shall I not let God's leather in,

by Kenneth Slessor

Earth-Visitors

(To N.L.)

THERE were strange riders once, came gusting down

Cloaked in dark furs, with faces grave and sweet,

And white as air. None knew them, they were strangers—

Princes gone feasting, barons with gipsy eyes

And names that rang like viols—perchance, who knows,

Kings of old Tartary, forgotten, swept from Asia,

Blown on raven chargers across the world,

by Kenneth Slessor

Nuremberg

So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,

So warm and still, that sometimes with the light

Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes,

There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight,

Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs.

But only in blown music from the town’s

Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d say

Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of years

by Kenneth Slessor

Captain Dobbin

CAPTAIN Dobbin, having retired from the South Seas

In the dumb tides of , with a handful of shells,

A few poisoned arrows, a cask of pearls,

And five thousand pounds in the colonial funds,

Now sails the street in a brick villa, "Laburnum Villa",

In whose blank windows the harbour hangs

Like a fog against the glass,

Golden and smoky, or stoned with a white glitter,

by Kenneth Slessor

Mangroves

These black bush-waters, heavy with crusted boughs

Like plumes above dead captains, wake the mind….

Uncounted kissing, unremembered vows,

Nights long forgotten, moons too dark to find,

Or stars too cold…all quick things that have fled

Whilst these old bubbles uprise in older stone,

Return like pale dead faces of children dead,

Staring unfelt through doors for ever unknown.

by Kenneth Slessor

South Country

After the whey-faced anonymity

Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,

After the rubbing and the hit of brush,

You come to the South Country

As if the argument of trees were done,

The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,

All ended by these clear and gliding planes

Like an abrupt solution.

by Kenneth Slessor

Thief Of The Moon

Thief of the moon, thou robber of old delight,

Thy charms have stolen the star-gold, quenched the moon-

Cold, cold are the birds that, bubbling out of night,

Cried once to my ears their unremembered tune-

Dark are those orchards, their leaves no longer shine,

No orange's gold is globed like moonrise there-

O thief of the earth's old loveliness, once mine,

Why dost thou waste all beauty to make thee fair?

by Kenneth Slessor