Psalm of Men in 2014 - MCMXXX

I wish I took this shot ... So many strange ideas surface watching this image

When I was living in England, Australia did become much clearer to me [...] In some ways – well, I think I said it somewhere in Johnno – I really had never left Australia. And I found that I could be a long way from the actual experience – I mean, a long way in time, but often a long way in place as well – before I could work out what it all meant. I think I’m very slow about things like that.

~ David Malouf / 80 in 2014 - like John Hatton born in early 1930s and this men remember hard times ...

"We are in a time not unlike the 30's when the need for job now rises high above the faraway dream of getting the right credentials from the right places. And so with literature, where a tide will be coming from the heartland, the boonies, and inner cities of brown, black, and white America. Its authors will be without proper literary pedigrees, they will have attended but done poorly in boring high schools, maybe gone to community college for a while, did or did not graduate from a four-year Institution of higher learning. Definitely not with laurels bestowed upon them by the top-tier universities, not fairy-dusted by a so-admired writing program, they will write about the common and the poor among us, those working more hours than they want, or much less than they need. William Zink is not the first, but he is certainly among the most ambitious of them in this coming wave." ~ Dagaberto Gilb

Poems, novels, short stories, as works of imagination, are written out of inner necessity; they come to us out of who-knows-where, choosing their own time and having no existence until they are there on the page. They are entirely personal. [...] The pieces in this collection are of another kind altogether and have a different source. They were from the beginning someone else’s idea; I wrote them on invitation, or at someone else’s suggestion. [...] These pieces of writing are personal in that they have their basis in personal experience and represent personal opinions, but their purpose was from the beginning public; they belong to that part of my life that is conscious and considered rather than dreamily obscure until it demands to be expressed …

~ David Malouf 

HER WISH

If she had her wish she would be a frog or a fish,
and this lake would be her own.
She would swim each morning a fluid breaststroke,
breaking the unbroken surface
reflecting the green pines of the wood.
It is too early for swimmers yet this year,
yet she is out there alone in the morning mist.
A foghorn booms from beyond two bends,
like a bullfrog calling for a mate to her.
She loves the feel of the surrounding;
she aches for my touch to be less demanding;
I wish for the key to such understanding.
The lake does no more than provide her support,
and warmth enough to glide free for a time.
What man can purport to be this smart,
would forever win the heart of his own heart's desire.