Saturday, August 15th 2020

 I decided to write this week's story in the form of a post that I might make to the blog.

It’s Wednesday already and I think I had better make a start on doing my homework for the Friday morning Writing Group.  As usual, the topics don’t immediately grab me and I let them sit in my sub-consciousness while I have a cup of coffee.  Not yet inspired, I make the tentative choice of Poem for an August Afternoon but there’s no verb in the title so I’m not sure whether I should ‘find’ a poem or ‘write’ a poem but it’s a writing group so probably the latter. Anyway, I’ve no idea what to write so I’ll check Google to see whether someone else’s writing might be the spur I need.

I quite like the poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne:

In the mute August afternoon
They trembled to some undertune
Of music in the silver air;
Great pleasure was it to be there.

… but it’s not what I’m looking for.  Maybe it’s too English so I turn to the New World and find this little ditty by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

When August days are hot an’ dry,
I won’t sit by an’ sigh or die,
I’ll get my bottle (on the sly)
And go ahead, and fish, and lie …

Then, of course, I realise, they’re both writing for the Northern Hemisphere where the weather is warm.  Those poems certainly don’t reflect a Tasmanian August.  Here, in Australia, and especially in Tasmania, August is generally one of the colder months and I certainly won’t forget that just  last week we had the worst snowstorm in my memory.

I go straight to my old favourites, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, and there’s stuff there about Winter, but not specifically mentioning August.  Roderick J Flanagan, an ex-patriate Irishman, in his poem Australian Winter, tries hard but his language is a bit flowery for my taste:

The hoar-frost marks the grassy lawn at morn,
⁠But fades when the first matin beam appears,
Till earth grows bright, as those erewhile forlorn,
⁠Joy when their hope a sunlit aspect wears.

In some ways, August seems to be the forgotten month for poets in the Southern Hemisphere – not quite Winter but not yet Spring.  We imagine we’ve put the worst of Winter behind us and are now in some sort of self-induced hibernation until the first daffodil and wattle blooms tell us that Spring is here.  It’s disappointing that poets seem to ignore the special flavour of a Tasmanian August- that never-ending dullness and dampness -so I have marked this month in Tasmania with an attempt at a haiku:

Grey skies overhead

Spreading their gloom on the world

A slough of despond.