For all my old school chums

who, forty years ago, were struggling through  HSC English with this play...a rich and profitable study it finally turned out to be.

under milk wood

ROSIE PROBERT (softly)
What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were 
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like seals, 
Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT
What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun? 

CAPTAIN CAT
As true as I’m here
Dear you Tom Cat’s tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon. 

ROSIE PROBERT
What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago? 

CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs. 

#Dylan Thomas

In homage to modernist poetry

To a Dead Lover

BY LOUISE BOGAN

The dark is thrown

Back from the brightness, like hair

Cast over a shoulder.

I am alone,

Four years older;

Like the chairs and the walls

Which I once watched brighten

With you beside me. I was to waken

Never like this, whatever came or was taken.

The stalk grows, the year beats on the wind.

Apples come, and the month for their fall.

The bark spreads, the roots tighten.

Though today be the last

Or tomorrow all,

You will not mind.

That I may not remember

Does not matter.

I shall not be with you again.

What we knew, even now

Must scatter

And be ruined, and blow

Like dust in the rain.

You have been dead a long season

And have less than desire

Who were lover with lover;

And I have life—that old reason

To wait for what comes,

To leave what is over.

Originally published in Poetry, August 1922.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bogan