Image Attribution: Wikimedia Commons: Screenshot from Shoes (1916) featuring actress Mary MacLaren, directed by Lois Weber.
Housewife
I married Alexander when I was nineteen
Just after leaving school
It was the Great Depression and we had little money
We brought three sons into the world
So a career outside the home
Was unthinkable for me
I was a prisoner of domesticity
Cooking on a fuel stove
Washing in a fire-heated copper
Sweeping constantly with a straw broom
And caring for those children
It all kept me very busy
My duty in life
Necessity mothered by convention
As the years passed
I found my head began to stay bent over
I had a slight curvature of the spine
Hands were calloused
And my back tended to ache often
The boys are gone now
Adrift in the wide world of business enterprise
Alex is gone too
Died a decade ago a year after he retired
I live alone
Not rich enough to pay for aged care
I’m a good cook
As my boys used to say
But my heart is not in that these days
What is the point of a gourmet meal when you are alone?
I’m content with sandwiches
No career to look back on either
No landmarks of high professional interest
To break the present boredom
I was merely a housewife
I am still, and there is no release
As I move towards my time to rest in peace
Nurse
I walk by others through the night
Listening for cries of pain
Always ready to help the desperate
In their struggle to survive
Day work is harder
More disasters tend to happen then
And routines never cease
Temperatures taken
Blood pressure recorded
Cleaning up the mess of the incontinent
Dressing wounds
Changing bandages
Attending intravenous antibiotics
There is never peace when you are on duty
And when you are home
The troubles of others stay in your mind
Especially if someone has died
We nurses are never rich
The burden of health funding is a political fantasy
Still it’s a profession
The university course designers tell us
With traditions dating back
Past time immemorial
And so we diligently practise our calling
Holding hands with the needy
Lifting the immobilised with cheery encouragement
Struggling with overburdened schedules
Mourning the deceased
Sometimes things are almost too much
As the number of patients exceeds the resources
Yet we struggle on
Tending our troubled sisters and brothers
Whatever their age
Not angels perhaps when each day ends
But kept on task by Heaven above
Because we have found fellow humans to love
Garbage Man
Garbage was my business
Way back in time
Before motorised waste wagons
Not a glamorous career
I was always so dirty
Doing the job
Lifting the tins and bags onto my shoulder
Was filthy, back breaking work
My status in society too
Was extremely low
When asked about my profession
I would always act as if I didn’t hear
And find a way to change the subject
Some people were kind though
Would greet me if we met
With at least a smile
Mrs Smythe of Verity Street
Who lived in a small cottage with a thatched roof
Would always leave a present
On her garbage tin lid at Christmas
Some other people
Did seem grateful for the hard work I did
But to most
I was a low-class embarrassment
They were glad to see leave their premises
I’m ninety-two now
And I’m glad my days as a garbage man are over
If still in that calling
I would be known as a waste manager
Ah yes, such are the foibles of Public Relations
For thirty-seven years I collected garbage
Slaving away to help my fellow humans
Keep their homes clean
Things were different in my day
The waste-makers were not so keen
Today it’s far easier to see where they have been
Tree
When I was a boy of twelve
I climbed a tree
It was a gentle, friendly thing
That tree
Smooth bark, many branches
A blue gum, eucalyptus globulus
The kind you see in lots of paintings
Leaves almost piquant
When you give yourself a taste
When I swung myself from branch to branch
I noticed flower buds in places
As I rose, the world changed
The higher I went the further I could see
And the more important I felt
Suddenly I was a prince admiring his domain
A master with a universe expanding as I rose
I disturbed a Black Friday,
As I threw an arm around a higher branch
The cicada made a loud drumming noise
And flew away alarmed
As I rose, a wider view of the bush unfolded
Then I caught sight of a bush bees nest
It was nestled where a branch joined the main trunk
Easily avoided as I rose to a koala height
From where I could see the horizon
How can I explain the triumph of that climb?
A feeling of great power came over me
I drank in the views with wonder
A Monarch butterfly danced on the air around me
And then rose even higher than my lofty position
Leaving me slightly envious
Thus my climb ended
I let myself come down eventually
Now I am old yet that memory lingers so clearly
But alas a sigh proceeds through my lips
For the tree is now wood chips
Past Glory
I was a star once
Fast as lightning on the football field
Even though I was only nine stone seven
Rugby League was my game
Saturday was my glory day
All teams used to play on that one day
With the Match Of The Day
On the Sydney Cricket Ground
Newtown was my team
Blue Bags was our invented name
To match our jerseys
By our deeds we gave a kind of respectability
To an underprivileged suburb
The game was faster in those days
Before they changed the rules to make players
Pound each other to death
Excitement then was in the air more often
As you had more space to run and score a try
Amidst a rising spectator roar
Players were not rich in that halcyon time
Not corporate robots rivalling each other for increased pay
Losing then was not a crime
As it was a game not a business
Television was not the prying eye it is today
Great deeds just happened
And had to live on
In the minds of those who saw them
That is why the fans of the present don’t know me
I am just a name in the ageing record books
No statue as I wasn’t top of the class
I can’t run any more either
I walk with a limp
And have to take many pills after breakfast
But I was a man of my time
And my memory of those games is still sublime
Injustice
It’s no fun being persona non grata
Shut off from the world
Treated like a virus
In a pandemic
You get so lonely
With only yourself as company
You with your awareness of the follies around you…
That is what happened to me
A long time ago now
I stumbled onto the crime of an influential person
Published the truth
And was treated as a leper by an individual with power
Ostracised
To become a convenient scapegoat
An ogre
Classified by true villains as worthy of blame
A handy target for secretly guilty others
So I was cast into bleak isolation
Strongly maligned
And pushed aside to be left all, all alone
With only friends on the net to keep me company
I lingered through a purgatory of pain
And endured the burden of abuse
What was my future?
Where did I go from there?
Painful questions with no easy answer
And yet there is always hope in the darkest of times!
Twenty years of exclusion with me shunned, rejected, shut out
Unjustly scorned
With never a trace of pity
Have passed now into the chasm of time
While today I still have a voice
To tell my story
The inconvenient truth about true demons
And for me a gentle triumph still to have survived
royciebaby
Royce Levi Australian Teacher and Author 