Lines Across a Divided Country

I’m learning things about poetry I’ve never previously been aware of. It seems that one can enter a conversation with a well-known poet by writing a glosa – taking four lines of any of their works and incorporating them in a particular expansion in one of your own. Björn Rudberg is today’s dVerse host, guiding us to have a go at this genre

So on the eve of one of Australia’s most contentious days, I’ve selected Banjo Paterson’s We’re All Australians Now. He wrote it in 1916, addressed to front-line WWI soldiers, reflecting on a newly evolved sense of national unity in the wake of the Gallipoli campaign, a failed military project, but a significant contributor to an independent and resilient national identity. Read it in full here. Over a century later, our feeling of unity is rather shattered, so here is an opportunity to dialogue with one of this country’s most celebrated bards over the matter.

Australia takes her pen in hand
To write a line to you,
To let you fellows understand
How proud we are of you.
– from “We’re All Australians Now,” Banjo Paterson, 1916

Canberra’s had a week of it
Of pollies’ hot air squawk
You’d think that they’d pull back a bit
And think before they talk
So now the coalition’s split
And we wonder how things stand
Reprising a time when it was fit –
Australia takes her pen in hand.

It seems that when we speak of unity
There’s much more that divides
Whate’er we hold up for scrutiny
Has us rushing to take sides
To find a middle voice
Between all points of view
Leads us to this choice
To write a line to you.

Climate change ignites a spark
as fire, wind, and floods increase
Yet every warning turns to bark
in quarrels that never cease
First Nations hold the know-how
To tend this wide brown land
Their ancient voice speaks even now
To let you fellows understand.

Instead, we play one-upmanship
on things meant to bind, not part
while trying not to lose our grip
and heal a broken heart.
Yes, once there was a common cause
that held us fast like glue
Enough to write without a pause
How proud we are of you.

Finis