Gwen Harwood Poems (Full)

Question 1

Father and Child: Barn Owl

Answer 1

Daybreak: the household slept.
I rose, blessed by the sun.
A horny fiend, I crept
out with my father's gun.
Let him dream of a child
obedient, angel-mind-

old no-sayer, robbed of power
by sleep. I knew my prize
who swooped home at this hour
with day-light riddled eyes
to his place on a high beam
in our old stables, to dream

light's useless time away.
I stood, holding my breath,
in urine-scented hay,
master of life and death,
a wisp-haired judge whose law
would punish beak and claw.

My first shot struck. He swayed,
ruined, beating his only
wing, as I watched, afraid
by the fallen gun, a lonely
child who believed death clean
and final, not this obscene

bundle of stuff that dropped,
and dribbled through the loose straw
tangling in bowels, and hopped
blindly closer. I saw
those eyes that did not see
mirror my cruelty

while the wrecked thing that could
not bear the light nor hide
hobbled in its own blood.
My father reached my side,
gave me the fallen gun.
'End what you have begun.'

I fired. The blank eyes shone
once into mine, and slept.
I leaned my head upon
my father's arm, and wept,
owl blind in early sun
for what I had begun

Question 2

The Lion’s Bride

Answer 2

I loved her softness, her warm human smell,
her dark mane flowing loose. Sometimes, stirred by
rank longing, laid my muzzle on her thigh.
Her father, faithful keeper, fed me well,
but she came daily with my special bowl
barefoot into my cage, and set it down:
our love feast. We became the talk of town,
brute king and tender woman, soul to soul.

Until today: an icy spectre shearthed
in silk, minced to my side on pointed feet.
I ripped the scented veil from its unreal
head and engorged the painted lips that breathed
our secret names. A ghost has bones, and meat!
Come soon, my love, my bride, and share this meal.

Question 3

Father and Child: Nightfall II

Answer 3

Forty years, lived or dreamed:
what memories pack them home.
Now the season that seemed
incredible is come.
Father and child, we stand
in time's long-promised land.

Since there's no more to taste
ripeness is plainly all.
Father, we pick our last
fruits of the temporal.
Eighty years old, you take
this late walk for my sake.

Who can be what you were?
Link your dry hand in mine,
my stick-thin comforter.
Far distant suburbs shine
with great simplicities.
Birds crown in flowering trees,

sunset exalts its known
symbols of transience.
Your passionate face is grown 
to ancient innocence.
Let us walk for this hour
as if death had no power

or were no more than sleep.
Things truly named can never
vanish from earth. You keep
a child's delight for ever 
in birds, flowers, shivery-grass - 
I name them as we pass.

"Be your tears wet?" You speak
as if air touched a string
near breaking point. Your check
brushes on mine. Old king,
your marvellous journey's done.
Your night and day are one

as you find with your white stick
the path on which you turn
home with the child once quick
to mischief, grown to learn
what sorrows, in the end, 
no words, no tears can mend.

Question 4

At Mornington

Answer 4

They told me that when I was taken
To the sea’s edge, for the first time,
I leapt from my father’s arms
And was caught by a wave and rolled
Like a doll among rattling shells;
And I seem to remember my father
Fully clothed, still streaming with water
Half comforting, half angry.
And indeed I remember believing
As a child, I could walk on water –
The next wave, the next wave –
It was only a matter of balance.

On what floor are they borne,
These memories of early childhood
Iridescent, fugitive
As light in a sea-wet shell,
While we stand, two friends of middle ages,
By your parents’ grave in silence
Among avenues of the dead
With their cadences of trees,
Marble and granite parting
The quick of autumn grasses.
We have the wholeness of this day
To share as we will between us.

This morning I saw in your garden
Fine pumpkins grown on a trellis
So it seemed that the vines were rising
To flourish the fruits of earth
Above their humble station
In airy defiance of nature
- a parable of myself,
a skinful of elements climbing
from earth to the fastness of light;
now come to that time of life
when our bones begin to wear us,
to settle our flesh in final shape

as the drying face of land
rose out of earth’s seamless waters
I dreamed once, long ago,
That we walked among day-bright flowers
To a bench in the Brisbane gardens
With a pitcher of water between us,
And stayed for a whole day
Talking, and drinking the water.
Then, as night fell, you said
“There is still some water left over.”
We have one day, only one,
But more than enough to refresh us.

At your side among the graves
I think of death no more
Than when, secure in my father’s arms,
I laughed at a hollowed pumpkin
With candle flame for eyesight,
And when I am seized at last
And rolled in one grinding race
Of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,
From which no hand will save me,
The peace of this day will shine
Like light on the face of the waters
That bear me away for ever.

Question 5

The Violets

Answer 5

It is dusk, and cold. I kneel to pick
frail melancholy flowers among
ashes and loam. The melting west
is striped like ice-cream. While I try
whistling a trill, close by his nest
our blackbird frets and strops his beak
indifferent to Scarlatti's song.
Ambiguous Light. Ambiguous Sky.

Towards nightfall waking from the fearful
half-sleep of a hot afternoon
at our first house, in Mitchelton,
I ran to find my mother, calling
for breakfast. Laughing, “It will soon
be night, you goose,” her long hair falling
down to her waist, she dried my tearful
face as I sobbed, “Where’s morning gone?”

and carried me downstairs to see
spring violets in their loamy bed.
Hungry and cross, I would not hold
their sweetness, or be comforted,
even when my father, whistling, came
from work, but used my tears to scold
the thing I could not grasp or name
that, while I slept, had stolen from me

those hours of unreturning light.
Into my father's house we went,
young parents and their restless child,
to light the lamp and the wood stove
while dusk surrendered pink and white
to blurring darkness. Reconciled,
I took my supper and was sent
to innocent sleep.
        Years cannot move

nor death's disorienting scale
distort those lamplit presences:
  a child with milk and story-book;
  my father, bending to inhale
  the gathered flowers, with tenderness
  stroking my mother's goldbrown hair.
  Stone-curlews call from Kedron Brook.
Faint scent of violets drift in air.