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Fukuoka

Prison hospital, Thailand, 1942

Flies buzz in the heavy heat

Rounding and dipping at my pursed lips

But I’m too feeble to resist them.

They’re warm and tickle-footed in the corners of my eyes.

Relentless black energy in a room of weariness.

Mother, I want to put down the load.

I raise myself onto my elbows

For a few seconds

Late in the afternoon

And take in the length of my body.

Light falls through the leaves outside.

I’m patch-worked.

Spindly legs lie in parallels

To the foot of my stretcher

And I cry because I’m so thin

And filthy.

Tropical ulcers.

O Mother, forgive me,

Dying is so easy.

Prison transport, Changi To Fukuoka, Japan, 1943

They bullied us into the hold

And screwed the hatch closed

On their shouts and chatter topside.

We panted in the foul air

Dreading an American torpedo.

There was no light for days.

My brother sitting by my side

Was a tense, humid presence

Slippery with perspiration.

There were sobs from in the dark.

From time to time

A man ten feet from me

Would strike a match

And check his watch.

Fifty desperate pairs of eyes

Would turn and stare.

In the smothering darkness

The point of flame

Was like a nail in a wall

That an unhinged man

Could hang a picture on.

Fukuoka

Worse by far

Than hot and hungry

Is cold and hungry.

Alighting, Japan, 1943

Even the gentler guards were kicking us

And shrieking like maniacs.

The locals turned out for the show,

Lining the platform

And then the streets

To hiss and spit

As we hobbled past.

I was in a dirty shirt

And tattered Changi loincloth.

There were dreadful beatings.

The women sneered at us.

The children gathered stones

From the roadside

And hurled them at our bony arses.

Ah, the conquering heroes.

And what right of reply?

I kept my head down.

With my frightened dick

Cringing tiny beneath my lap-lap

Even an angry sideways glance

Would have seemed, to all of us,

More than a little absurd.

First night

It was different then.

There was no Hiroshima.

No 1945.

It was just the beginning of something horrible

That could go on forever.

Prisoners of war

Mostly fetid stillness

And an occasional slick spasm of resentment

Like slimy carp in a diminishing pond-pool

Writhing against a weir.

Signing up

When my father got it in the neck in 1917

Crockery rattled in the kitchen

Of a tiny terrace house in Redfern.

Black lace doily’d a bewildered widow.

The evening that the news came through

Saw us three small children

Asking for dinner at tea-time

Like it was any other day.

My mother wailed.

Not quite comprehending

We cried ourselves to sleep that night

Sensing, correctly, a colossal shift.

Off civvy street

Wally and I joined up together in ’40 –

Two brothers.

It was the done thing.

My mother paled when we sauntered into the kitchen –

Our uniforms and slouch hats,

And our rude boots

Scuffing black into her nice clean linoleum.

Adversaries

We signed up to fight the Germans

Like our parents had.

We hadn’t even thought about the Japs

Who at the time

Might have seemed to us

Somewhat beneath our dignity.

Proving grounds

I recall reeling hard against

A snag beneath the surface,

Bending the rod with

A child’s thin-lipped determination.

When the line snapped

Sending a whisper of thread

Curling like a burnt hair

Over the river

Dad stepped up to me

And took the rod from my hands.

He slipped the handline

Into my palm.

The one for women and tiddlers.

Mum

On the day we shipped out

She took me aside

When my brother wasn’t looking.

She said:

Look after Wally will you?

I. Grudges

I have noticed that the infant’s soft hand,

By some primordial reflex,

Will close involuntarily around a finger

Or lock of hair.

Snatching and the clenched fist

Are ours by instinct.

Opening the palm is a learned gesture.

Invasion

Invasion is a narrowed man

Half rubbed out.

A face smeared sideways.

A distillate reeking of ditch water.

It is a man-thing dragged from a roadside channel

With one arm bent stiffly across the chest,

The other rigid by his side,

Legs curled like a foetus kinked at the hip.

Invasion is

One wit joking

That they could make a fortune

Hiring his withered arse out

To horny soldiers four weeks on the peninsula.

And it is everybody laughing.

And it is the dog finding it irresistible –

His dainty shy licking,

His cool wet nose nuzzling the creased leather-flesh,

And him having a go at it

Before anyone could stop him.

(Dragged it three feet before they shoo’d him away.)

It is the dog grinning and bounding and wagging its tail,

Joining in the fun,

Keen for another go

In next to

No time

At all.

I. Cruelty

Gold Tooth –

Who beat us worse than any of them –

Was a market gardener before the war.

He grew tomatoes.

II. Cruelty

Does it give him a hard-on?

Does it stiffen him up?

Does he return to barracks

And toss off under the blankets?

Brother

I’m worried about my brother.

He carries himself too tall.

They beat him more than most of us

Because he forgets to feel humiliated.

Fukuoka winter

No part of a woman is as soft as this –

My tepid penis in the cold morning

Pissing steam out of the ground.

Burial, 1917

Poor Dad.

I imagine a lull –

A sudden peculiar ceasing of the guns –

And the sound of shovels

Going to work in the stillness.

I’ve buried a few myself now.

A shovel plunging into the loam

Sounds like a gasp of surprise.

III. Cruelty

A cruel man will set himself

Above your cowering body,

Position and re-position his stance,

And then swing the stick.

He takes time to find the pain for you.

The white nub of the ankle bone,

The round knuckle of the wrist,

The elegantly curved collar bone.

And your balls of course.

He’ll aim for your balls

And laugh.

How I remember my brother

The whir of cicadas lends a bogus urgency

To the scone-dry heat.

Over the fence and in the house

It’s ennui and lethargy.

We are Cowboys and Indians

War-whooping in the backyard –

Quick draws on the pop guns

And keen on extravagant deaths –

Brave warriors disdaining warm milk,

Determined to camp in the cubby house ’til dawn

But coming at dusk when beckoned from the hot back-step:

C’mon kids. That’ll do.

Come and get your dinner.

I can still hear her

And the squeaky fly-screen slamming at our backs

As they fade into dark interiors.

Note: This poem was published in slightly different form as ‘Backyard Warriors’ in the journal Coppertales.

II. Grudges

Only dogs will forgive without rancour.

Closer to their elemental stuff

They understand the basic impersonality

Of sudden cruelty.

Taking life

I wasn’t looking for him.

It was before my capture.

He stalked into my sights

From behind a banana tree

And I killed him with a single shot.

Was he a deep thinker?

Frugality

Vic Paterson of Drummoyne

Had his arm crushed in a mine collapse

And died of gangrene three weeks later.

A former barrack-mate,

I helped to bury him.

As we lowered his tiny body into the grave

I noticed in his face that something was awry –

They’d taken his false teeth out.

He’d have hated that,

And two days later

The shambling Oklahoman

With a new wide smile.

A beating

Gold Tooth laid into me one day

With a bamboo stick.

I could tell he wasn’t serious

And took the blows

Bent around my knees,

Hands over my soft skull.

One, two, three, four.

I counted them off in my head

And glimpsing his split-toed sandals

Could think of nothing better

Than a man with his

Undies wedged up his arse.

Despair

I have forgotten all their names –

The dead ones, I mean.