  Poetry
This week: Dame Mary Gilmore Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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| This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady |
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No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest
by Dame Mary Gilmore
Sons of the mountains of Scotland,
Welshmen of coomb and defile,
Breed of the moors of England,
Children of Erin's green isle,
We stand four square to the tempest,
Whatever the battering hail-
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
Our women shall walk in honour,
Our children shall know no chain,
This land, that is ours forever,
The invader shall strike at in vain.
Anzac!...Tobruk!...and Kokoda!...
Could ever the old blood fail?
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
So hail-fellow-met we muster,
And hail-fellow-met fall in,
Wherever the guns may thunder,
Or the rocketing air-mail spin!
Born of the soil and the whirlwind,
Though death itself be the gale-
No foe shall gather our harvest
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
We are the sons of Australia,
of the men who fashioned the land;
We are the sons of the women
Who walked with them hand in hand;
And we swear by the dead who bore us,
By the heroes who blazed the trail,
No foe shall gather our harvest,
Or sit on our stockyard rail.
On August 16, 1865 in Cotta Walla, a settlement in New South Whales, Donald Cameron and his wife Mary Ann Beattie welcomed daughter Mary Jean Cameron into their family. When Gilmore was one years old her father took a job in Wagga Wagga as a station manager. He only stayed at this job for a short time before becoming a carpenter. He built the house Mary lived in as a child. At fourteen Gilmore started her courses to become a teacher and worked as an assistant at her uncle’s school. In 1882 Mary passed her teaching exams and started teaching at Wagga Wagga public schools. She taught there for the next three years. Gilmore worked for a short time at a couple of schools before she started teaching at Silverton, near the mining town of Broken Hill.
During this time Gilmore started writing poetry and she developed her socialist views. In 1890 she moved to Sydney and began writing for the “Bulletin.” The Bulletin published Gilmore’s first verse. She began to be recognized as a radical poet, speaking out for the workers and the oppressed. Gilmore followed a group of fellow writers to Paraguay where they had set up a colony. They had hoped that this colony would be a communal colony and that they would all be equal. The colony failed, but Gilmore met and married William Gilmore through this experience. William moved Mary and their two year old son Billy to Argentina, then Buenos Aires, followed by Patagonia. Then the family finally had money to move back to England in 1902 followed shortly there after by their return to Australia.
The Gilmore’s began farming near Casterton, Victoria. Gilmore started working as an editor for “The Worker,” in 1908. She became the first woman union member of the Australian Workers' Union. The newspaper gave Gilmore the opportunity to campaign for better working conditions for women and children’s welfare. In 1910 Gilmore published her first volume of poetry “Marri'd and Other Verses,” followed by "The Tale inks" and "Six Songs from the South" both published in 1916. "The Passionate Heart" was published in 1918 and "The Hound Road," in 1922.
Over the next 7 years Gilmore published four more volumes of poetry. In 1931 she was let go from The Worker as her political views became too radical for the Australian Workers Union. Gilmore soon started writing for the Tribune. Despite controversial politics, Gilmore was appointment as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1937, becoming Dame Mary Gilmore. Gilmore was the first person to be granted this award for services to literature. During World War II she wrote a verse "No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest." Gilmore then moved to to Sydney and wrote nine more volumes of poetry and prose.
Dame Mary Gilmore died in 1962, at ninety-seven years old. She was accorded the first state funeral to a writer since the death of Henry Lawson in 1922.
Old Botany Bay
by Dame Mary Gilmore
"I'm old
Botany Bay;
stiff in the joints,
little to say.
I am he
who paved the way,
that you might walk
at your ease to-day;
I was the conscript
sent to hell
to make in the desert
the living well;
I bore the heat,
I blazed the track-
furrowed and bloody
upon my back.
I split the rock;
I felled the tree:
The nation was-
Because of me!
Old Botany Bay
Taking the sun
from day to day...
shame on the mouth
that would deny
the knotted hands
that set us high!
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
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Humanities struggle for world peace
Seems to be a long lost cause
It runs alongside man’s rage
Against our precious mother nature
Both set on their own paths
A collision course of outright
DESTRUCTION!
It is a battle of our internal souls
That we live to destroy,
Whilst destroying to stay alive.
Honorable mention:
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#2157238 by Not Available. |
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Poetry: May 23, 2018 Issue [#8915]
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