DANNY GARDNER

Danny Gardner has lived almost continuously in Sydney since 1983. He is a freelance journalist, novelist and poet. He's had two books of poetry 'Hope in Progress' and 'Made in Public' produced in the UK and has been published in several magazines and newspapers and has read his poetry in the US , England and Australia. In 1997 he was awarded a 'highly recommended' citation in the Northern Territory's Red Earth Poetry Prize for his poem: No Particular January. In 2001 his Perils of Translation was joint winner of the World Congress of Poetry Prize. In 2003 he and Sue Hicks co-edited the acclaimed anthology 'Open Boat - Barbed Wire Sky' - proceeds of which to aid refugees.
They were each awarded a Centenary Medal for service to the community in 2003.
Danny currently convenes Live Poets - Sydney's longest running (15th year) poetry performance venue at the same address, on the fourth Wednesday night of each month.

--------

STONEHENGE

Tumours jutting monstruous out of the mundane,
The stones are best seen from a distance,
In late afternoon, or before the sun.
Better seen, far from the crowd's dumb gestures,
For the road to them has told the world
What you want to experience uniquely,
Before anyone else saw them but those who made them.

The trained gaze of millions will never solve
The riddle of these rocks.
So man puts them to one side,
Up on the shelf for further study...
Meanwhile, these roads, those cars and buses,
The almost-nude breasts on a billboard advertising Irish Cream,
Have their daily job to do.

------

WHEN MONKEYS BLINK

When monkeys sit and blink
Are they thinking?
Are they looking at the mirror inside their minds
Like we do?
Is it imagining itself in the past?
Or coming to a realisation...
Sensing an idea that my be just about to crystallise?
Reflecting on the pool of habit...

There's nothing more human
Than seeing a monkey sitting, blinking.
Hopefully, with self-regard.
Feeling a need for judgement
Over a problem, or a pleasure.

But here is the test:
Do monkeys use emotion to grin and frown?
Or merely yawn or grimace
To jet oxygen to the brain?

Perhaps we just prefer to ponder:
What is their blinking for?
But to refresh the eye
And see within;
Imagining a significant other -
And recognising itself.

As we watch each other, blinking,
And think:
What is in their head?

------

WHAT WAR IS LIKE NOW
(Baghdad 1991)

We watch it on TV.
We hear what's appropriate,
And accept the vision we're given.
From this far away
You can't see the screams
Or hear the blood, anyway.
When a cross-hair
Matches another against the grey background,
A bridge blows,
A building spasms smokily
Into rubble.
A long line of fleeing vehicles, however,
Is just as good for moving target practice.
The refugees have been running
From guns, on either side:
That chain of jumbled belongings,
Jellied metal and coagulating flesh
Couldn't possibly be hieroglyphs of our species -
Could it?
Some image surely concocted by a madman.
And, frankly, not a patch on the imaginative scale,
Of the 'live' testimony of a lone reporter,
Holding his breath
As a smart bomb
Slides past his 12th floor hotel window -
Scenting out its next 'processable' fodder.

That was virtual war, at its apogee
Yeah. Like being all the way inside
A Nintendo game.

------

JAWS THAT WOULD NOT CLOSE

Rudyard Kipling had told my father
Of tigers in Ceylon,
But this one looked more like a dog
That had accidentally
Scraped under some tar-covered grate.
And there, instead of the blood-freezing roar,
Was its queer, staring silence.
The bark: some clumsy, sniffed afterword,
The tail, a tacked-on burden, never moving.
And, instead of the flashing incisors
Of cinema screens and circuses,
Were the jaws that would not close.

That Tasmanian Tiger
Was the last one caught, a neighbour said:
'And, when the boat arrives,
Will be sent to the Melbourne zoo.'
My father's job, as a nine year old
In his small-town fear,
Was to feed it.

When one day, the child, my father,
More careless than bold,
Left the tiger's cage-door open
Guilt's hot stripe had no sooner bladed him,
When he was magnetised, to that seductive feel
Of that soft, short, hair on his flank,
The quick, soundless pant against his cheek...

And then their pulses separated again.

The very-hungry Thylacine stood
Caught, between the open cage-door,
And the thrown sheep scraps at his feet.

Such are the sometimes unwitting manipulations
Of men. Of fathers who never quite die.
Who seem to grow more alive, after they've gone.
And small, scared boys,
Who have read Kipling
And are doing a job in an isolated place
No-one else wants.

------

SCOTT'S TURNING
(after David Tribe)

I can see now that Oates was right.
That our futile obsession,
Of putting one foot, eternally in front of the other,
To plant a blind flag in a white space - like the nightly hieroglyph
Against the blank expanse of the diary page -
Has been prayer-load enough for any mortal.
This exploration of each moment
In a lost ship on the ice-ocean,
Apparently no different from the thousands before it -
It alone, now defines our existence.
Only God, or the concept of a higher power
Knows if it is a test, ultimately,
Not of our resilience,
But our capability, our race's capacity,
For morbidity - an attempt to demonstrate
What is, or what is not,
Important to us - after all.

Our families, far away. have little influence
As the tent-lamp goes out, on this planet,
More familiar now, than the one I have forsaken,
And so patiently waiting on my conversion,
Like that of our prophet, Oates.
Like him, I will hear no sound
Within the night's careering gale,
Remember no message-vestige appropriate
From this 'over-crowded' light-raft.
Only feel the conviction
Of true illumination being only a 'short walk' away.
But: "I might be some time."

Now, with not a word necessary to my companions,
I leave my body too, to follow where he went,
Awakening, to a strange longing,
And home, changed from however I ever saw it,
Yet as close, as the ringing of a church bell
To call errant sheep,
Or a train whistle across a West Country dawn
In unheeded warning.

NB: Robert Falcon Scott (Great Britain) was an Antarctic explorer in the early 20th century. Oates was a member of Scott's crew of five that made the final dash to the South Pole, but failed to return.