Kinsella

I heard the news today.
Oh boy.
Well, not really news,
But it was NPR.

They said a poet was
Going to be on,
I nearly turned it off,
But listened anyway.

John, it seems, is quite famous,
I thought he'd be stuffy,
I thought he'd be boring.
Instead, he was an Aussie.

In an instant flash,
I go back,
To much younger days.
In Brisbane.
In Hobart.
In Whyallah and Geraldton.

Our Aussie cousins,
I might presume to say,
Are what I could imagine us,
In more youthful day.

They play rough,
Work rough,
Take life as it comes.
I could have moved there.
I sigh as the memory fades.

John comes on.

He is funny,
He is quick,
The interviewer must keep up.
Too late, John leaves him in the dust.

The jokes are funny,
The stories too.
Then John reads "Bogged"

He laments and sympathizes,
With a truck
Stuck
In the mud.
Bogged down.
From front and side and back and top.
Bogged down.
Stuck.

Its amazing.
Its funny.
Its so simple and yet complex.
Its life,
Only as an Aussie can tell it.

Then he says of another he wrote,
About being bit by a poisonous spider.
He rushes in to write the tale,
His words begin to slip and slide,
As he describes,
What it is like.

"John," his wife laments,
"You really must get to hospital."
"Yes, yes," he quips,
"Soon as I get this wri