on 8/1/05 3:38 AM, Jennifer Compton at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Bunbury features in The Importance of Being Earnest, doesn't it?
> cheers - jen
Nice to think of a town named after a Wilde joke...
Readings! ... Last May I jotted down the following while the experience was
new. I may even have posted it in which case excuse and ignore ...
My poet friend Brendan Ryan [Why I am Not a Farmer (Five Islands Press)]
said: Max, come to Koroit (Western District, Victoria, where several Ryans
were and are farmers) for the Irish Festival, your friend can sing in the
Danny Boy contest, prize money one thousand dollars, and you and I can read
our poems on Friday night at the football club and Saturday in the Village
Café.
Approaching Koroit you admire the black soil beloved of the
nineteenth-century Irish migrant potato farmers.
Sadly weıd missed Friday night and the first heat of Danny Boy contestants.
Heat? Heap, we called it amongst ourselves.
Saturday the usually sad old town (cars excluded) was throbbing the length
of its one shopping street: buskers, leprechaun clowns, and funfair rides
and sideshows in the side streets.
The café was full, Brendan had just sat down but seemed pleased and my name
was with the m. c. Some girl poet had many short pieces to read out, I
listened badly as is my wont, and squinted at her from my corner as she
mouthed the mike, framed by the big plate glass window with the thronged
street outside.
My turn I began with my piece in praise of the Celtic band Conundrum Iıd
heard in Melbourne a few weeks back (they too were in town), followed up
with various slight listenable pieces. What an audience! They got the jokes
and clapped each time I paused, whether or not the piece was over. I
launched into a longer, final piece, sensing they were with me on my summer
voyage floating down the Yarra one long afternoon. My voice lilted with the
river rhythm. Then a further rhythm from the street joined mine, it was
lilting and skirling and nearing and louder, the massed pipes of the Koroit
and District Pipe Band reached the café window as my skinny-dipping lyrical
memory poem reached its mellowest moment.
The café filled further for the Danny Boy heap. The laminated words were on
every table, courtesy of Guinness.
Oh, Danny Boy the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain-side.
The summerıs gone, and all the roses falling,
Itıs you, itıs you must go, and I must bide.
But come ye back when summerıs in the meadow,
Or when the valleyıs hushed and white with snow,
Itıs Iıll be here in sunshine or in shadow,
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so!
But when ye come, and all the flowırs are drying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Yeıll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say and Ave there for me;
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
It was a serious hour, the chests swelled, the arms were outstretched, the
procession was long. Our friendıs turn came, her nerves showed, her voice
wavered, she moved me, but only a very imaginative judge would pick her for
the final when the stolid confident ones were swamping the day.
The judgeıs decision was final.
I on the other hand had been approached by our genial m. c. proffering
twenty dollars for my trouble. A personal first. If only all our expenses
were tax-deductible.
For days I couldnıt get Danny Boy out of my head.
Max R (whose mum's dad emigrated from Donegal ... )
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