Plays & Poems
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Australia My Home
Sydney
Sydney is the
lilting water of the harbour,
the beckoning heads, the lure of the ocean,
the industrious ferries, the chattering vessels,
the leaning sails scornful of the engine.
Sydney is the
careless fling of towers
crowding out the old city’s houseroom,
the windows winking back rich sunsets
or blazing candelabra when night brings gloom.
Sydney is the
great skirts of the suburbs –
the motor car sprawl of independence,
each man on his own fractional acre
each man defended by his own fence.
Sydney is no
houses look alike
when paint and shrubs have taken over
or Spain or Greece have added their touches
their thoughts of home for old-world lovers.
Sydney is the
noise of brisk factories
that weave with all the skills of man
so many myriad miracles of living
more magical than any magician.
Sydney is the
constellation of light
distant across extravagant domain
seen from the Blue Mountains by night,
city to escape but to embrace again.
The Developers
They say they are
building a new Florence or Rome
by tearing our city’s heart out stone by stone
by futuristic imitations of their fountains
pedestrian plazas in their cubic mountains.
They say how welcome their celestial pyramids
and columns as burgeoning Venetians did
before their Doge’s Palace or St. Marks
that we shall worship from their concrete parks,
will lift our reverent eyes towards their spires
in awe that human hands can build so high.
Will they lift up
our minds and prove to be
patrons of arts, a great nobility
as once Medici were - their worthy peers
of statesmen, city fathers, engineers?
Will lifeblood of a new tradition grow
to give their looming towers that genius we know?
I fear its burial in their office catacombs.
I fear they make us neither Florence nor Rome.
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