Malcolm Miller's Poems

Thanks, Followers!

Malcolm Miller — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:06:22 +0000

I’m saying thanks to all my Followers; they help me keep going. Today’s poem wasn’t exactly earth-shaking, but I think that as long as I keep writing, some will turn out to be good. Maybe (just maybe!) you think this is like the million monkeys with keyboards typing away at random, and the chance of them actually writing a book. I have hopes of doing better than monkeys. I think some of my poems are quite good. Publishers have also thought so – hooray! A poet has to be a good liar, that is, good at making things that can’t be verified seem plausible, like any story-teller. If they are a romantic like me, they take a childish pleasure in some quite simple things, even though they think that Love is the most important thing.

I sit and file

Malcolm Miller — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:47:18 +0000

I sit and file

I sit and file my nails
too brittle now at 82 to cut with scissors
and think of what they’re made of.
It looks like cheap plastic,
the sort called ‘celluloid’
but it’s really made of protein,
a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen,
and nitrogen
and perhaps some others that I don’t know about.
It’s one of those fantastic possibilities
of carbon life.
That wonder element, formed in stars,
blown into space, condensed in rocks
to surface on new planets
joins up in so many promiscuous ways
to mingle with others to make life.
Well, living things, with cells in which
proteins mix to make a million compounds
that grow limbs and brains and guts
and all that’s us and all the rest
that we eat and that eat us.
Will I file my toenails now?

Australia’s day

Malcolm Miller — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:04:15 +0000

This is a slightly cynical poem about cricket, and the slightly childish (to me) hype around Australia day. I don’t think there’s a better place to live than Australia, but I don’t feel much need to emphasise this. I’m sorry that Tandulka didn’t get his hundredth century.

Australia’s day

We sit and watch the cricket on a day when nothing happens

(Advance Australia Fair!)

The great green oval with its scattered figures all in white

its shaded stands filled with those in colour, with flags,

while on the oval strong Australian men throw balls

or whack them to the boundary or past the fence.

The Indian team send out their finest warriors two by two,

their greatest batsman ready to become the master of the century.

He fails again to cheering from the crowd.

(Advance Australia Fair!)

Our national day, and India’s, coincide, but on the pitch

prepared with cunning to benefit the batsmen

there’s no equality, it’s all or nothing as the mighty team

Australia musters bring down their rivals with apparent ease.

The umpires watch to ensure the rules are kept,

which make Australia’s victory a dusty triumph.

(Advance Australia Fair!)

As usual nothing happens, since our side wins as we expect,

their champion defeated in a single combat with our team,

leaving us to with nothing else to do but contemplate the Honours list.

(Advance Australia Where?)

I saw two stars

Malcolm Miller — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:24:45 +0000

This is a little experience that started late last night and endid with a little poem this afternoon. As a former astronomer, the night sky is as familiar to me as my own back yard, and I spot any anomaly very quickly.

I see two stars

Eyes briefly open
I see two stars.
The clock’s red digits say 3.30,
the sky is full of cloud, except
for two stars.
The sleeping brain clicks on.
Quicker than any word can form
than the next red number comes
a wordless sign lights up,
“something’s wrong!”
Nowhere in the sky,
the familiar as my backyard sky
I know so well
are two stars like that,
equal in brightness,
spaced like that,
at just that angle.
Numbers, numbers, I key in
to the hard disc in my mind.
Tomorrow I will use them, know at last
those two wrong stars that cannot be.
It’s afternoon when I remember.
I open software, move the mouse,
and then I know.
The impossible stars
were not two stars.
One of them was ringed Saturn,
the other Spica.

Friends can choose

Malcolm Miller — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:56:06 +0000

This poem encapsulates my ideas, expressed in the short essay below, about extramural relationships. The important words are because it is a loving thing to do. Even the Christians give lip service to the phrase ‘Love one another’ which they sometimes say is fundamental to their religion. But they have never really practised what they preach, have they?

Friends can hold hands, and talk, and hug and kiss.
And if they choose, they can join in sex,
Sharing their bodies with the other
In sheer affection and goodwill,
Because it is a loving thing to do.
Affirming love with sex, there is no doubt,
Could not be sweeter, no exploitation here,
Just mutual generosity and delight,
Giving a new dimension to their feelings
For each other; no power things, no desperate needs,
No hidden hates, no urges to possess or own another.
No wish to hurt, no chance of any selfish abdication
Or abandonment for momentary satisfaction,
Just love expressed as sensuality and deep affection.

The importance of love

Malcolm Miller — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 23:25:04 +0000

I was pleased today to read the blog of ‘Leo Rex’ who wrote about the importance of love, and especially unconditional love. Love has been one of the great motivators in my life, and also the source of the creative energy that engenders my poems. I’m sure than my extramural friends Lesley and Josephine would agree, if they were to have a look at his blog.

Of course, ‘extramural’ means ‘outside the walls’, ie, I don’t live with them. The English language is very deficient in words or exact expressions about close relationships outside marriage, which I attribute to the influence of the mediaeval church, still incredibly strong in our much changed society.

I felt that the French have a much less rigid view of relationships, and that this probably existis in their language. We have a slew of words and expressions which are not used in ‘polite society’ to refer to relationships other than married ones, as though the others had no right to exist.: mistress, paramour, courtesan, ‘bit on the side’, ‘more than friend but less than wife’. I looked up the French word compagne in some online dictionaries, but found that their language is almost as confused as English. Strictly, it means ‘female companion’, but even this may be only a euphemism. While it’s more OK among the French to speak of a man having a mistress, we are much more inhibited, and such a situation is ‘scandal sheet’ material, to be said behind the hand and not mentioned in the ‘family media’. I found the words ‘cocotte’ and ‘canif” which were said to be equivalent to ‘bit on the side’. Phrases included ‘compagne de jeu’ (playmate), ‘jolie compagne’ (pretty friend) and ‘concubine ou epouse’, ‘escort’, and ‘amie’. So the French are as confused as we are about extramural relationships.

I have found that for me, marriage is no more than a civil contract formalising an agreement between two people to have an intimate relationship. And I’ve also found that it’s possible to have intimate relationships quite outside marriage which are very satisfactory. Moreover, only one marriage at a time is sanctioned by old laws, and even the newer ones which recognise ‘de facto’ marriages as legal entities. Just the same, it is easy to have more than one intimate relationship, and I have been in this position, of loving two women, for a long time, and not always the same two.

What is one to call those other relationships? There has been talk of ‘polyamory’, and that does encompass them, but the word is unknown to most people. We are still in a death-grip of old religious compulsions about how we are to live with the approval of the ‘church’. No wonder concepts like ‘same-sex marriage’ cause such fury among the religious! How dare anybody contradict the rulings of the holy book, as interpreted by centuries of the devout! THEY know how we all should live, and they never stop telling us that their word comes directly from their gods. But they are wrong, simply slaves to superstition….

A source of satisfaction

Malcolm Miller — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:59:45 +0000

Today I saw once again that people are still reading my poem, ‘Morning Flight from Crawley, 1944′, which I think is one of my best efforts. It also shows how ancient I am; I wonder how many of the flying boat crews of that time are still alive? I’m glad that I found the perfect illustration for the poem. I still admire the Consolidated PBY Catalina as one of the great aircraft, used by Britain and Australia as well as by the US.

I write about the great loves of my life, women, astronomy, and aviation in the main. But as a perfect dilettante and ‘Jack of all trades’ I have other interests and occupations, like theatre and acting, psychotherapy, and lots more. I see I now have 32 different categories of material in this blog. A ‘grasshopper mind’?

Thanks to WordPress, I have been able to see a wide range of responses to my writing, even though the vast majority of readers remain anonymous and never comment. Of course I crave feedback and attention, and hope that there are readers ‘out there’. I’d like to know more about them.

2011 in review

Malcolm Miller — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:59:58 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

a poetic conceit

Malcolm Miller — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:21:41 +0000

From ‘the home for Lost Doggerel’!

I like to have my poems read

sometimes I think them up in bed

and in the morning, with the sun,

I often find that they are gone

but sometimes with a kiss of life

the precious words just might revive

so in the morning, after dressing,

computer grants a digital blessing

I’ll send them out in cyberspace

by posting on my poems blog

and also on my ‘Wall’ in Face-

book and thus expand my catalogue.

I’ll never have a writer’s fame

but I just love the poet’s game

It’s something I do just for fun

in classic forms or just homespun

A sonnet with a strict rhyme scheme

is good to emphasize one theme

but free verse with many more dimensions

has been the source of some dissension

some folk revere the classic rules

and think ‘free verse’ the work of fools

but I love poems of every kind

and write whatever comes to mind.

My best-loved book!

Malcolm Miller — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:26:13 +0000

Geoff Page is a Canberra poet with over 800 poems published. He wrote a series of articles in The Canberra Times about what he felt were examples of the best poems from all English poetry, and it was published, as a collection, as 80 Great Poems from Chaucer to Now in 2006. If I was to be marooned on an island with only one book, this is the one I would choose, especially if I had writing materials, for it is a wonderful source of inspiration for any would-be poet!