I get what you mean about knowing Thruppence now, Andrew. I was just a bit
slow.
Slessor’s poem, Doug, was The Night Ride, but I can’t say I was consciously
channeling it. Great poem. I am tempted to appropriate ‘the dark train’!
Gas flaring on the yellow platform; voices running up and down;
Milk-tins in cold dented silver; half-awake I stare,
Pull up the blind, blink out - all sounds are drugged;
the slow blowing of passengers asleep;
engines yawning; water in heavy drips;
Black, sinister travellers, lumbering up the station,
one moment in the window, hooked over bags;
hurrying, unknown faces - boxes with strange labels -
all groping clumsily to mysterious ends,
out of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates,
their echoes die. The dark train shakes and plunges;
bells cry out, the night-ride starts again.
Soon I shall look out into nothing but blackness,
pale, windy fields, the old roar and knock of the rails
melts in dull fury. Pull down the blind. Sleep. Sleep
Nothing but grey, rushing rivers of bush outside.
Gaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.
Kenneth Slessor <https://www.poemhunter.com/kenneth-slessor/poems/>
Bill
On Tue, 7 May 2019 at 2:08 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I would have sworn there’s a famous poem about a night train, not the one
> by Rodney Hall of that title, but earlier, maybe of a station at night, but
> I can’t think of it right now.I thought you might be alluding to it, Bill.
>
> Doug
>
> > On May 5, 2019, at 2:29 AM, Andrew Burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Thruppence was 3 pennies in my childhood economy - but it was also a
> young
> > Indigenous girl's mission name (why, I don't know).
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > On Thu, 2 May 2019 at 09:12, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks, Pat, Andrew, Doug. Re Thruppence, other famous poem references,
> I
> >> am totally in the dark.
> >>
> >> Bill
> >>
> >> On Thu, 2 May 2019 at 1:55 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> A good question & sharp here, Bill, with that references to a famous
> >>> earlier poem…
> >>>
> >>> Doug
> >>>
> >>>> On Apr 30, 2019, at 5:13 PM, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Her night train query:
> >>>>
> >>>> Excuse me, do you know
> >>>>
> >>>> Sunshine*, at all?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> bw
> >>>>
> >>>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
> https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations
> 2 (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
> Listen. If (UofAPress):
>
>
> We live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose
> events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. Is is in
> this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope, that we find a
> crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more
> deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead
> us to believe…The energy of one’s perception become inseparable from the
> energy of creation.
>
> – John Berger
>
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