Page 5 - eMuse Vol.9 No.07_Neat

Dear Wally,
I’m resending the celebratory piece on your exceptional efforts
with eMuse and in respect of its hundredth issue. I know you are
probably a might too humble to actually print it, but in a small way
I reckon it sums up the gratitude in the minds of all of your reader-
ship. You can tell them that I put a gun at your head to print the
bloody thing. Anyway mate, it’s your call. I can understand your
reticence... us Aussies are never good at passing on compliments.
They almost have to be extracted out of us with tweezers.

Re the second piece . . . Let’s hope we bring some serious think-
ing to bear before we cast these monuments aside. Maybe just
four lines of sensitively designed verse adjacent each monument
highlighting the other side of the story could be a way of lessening
the tensions.
Kind regards.

Rob
Our First Five Star General

Captain Tom’s a hundred mate, and they’ve just made him an
honorary Colonel,
And as you light the fuse to your one hundredth E-Muse… we’d
like to make you an honorary General,
It’s been a monumental effort Wally, a mighty muscular rendition, Edward Colston
A marvellous engager, from Wally the Major, and Mary your mate Perilous passage in a torturous test with near twenty thousand
on the mission, dead on the manifest,
Your depictions grand of the Great Southland educates like no other, Some say he sought solace in Bristol’s inns, to offset the onset of
The folk lore and facts and its explorative tracts, bonds us like his mega mortal sins,
sister to brother . But in that mesmerising mix where philosophies conjoin,
Your research is ripe with the tenor and type of things inconceiv- There’s two sides and an edge to each and every coin.
able… incredible… alien, The bureaucrats of Bristol were on a mission, to bolster their
The drifts from your dredge are the things that give edge to the boroughs on the ‘Invention of tradition’,
ironbark in that wedge called ‘Australian’, And it took quite a while, as they cast around, and they finally
There’s a wonderment in the worlds that you’ve quarried over found its cost at a thousand pound,
time, in the tapestries and histories and those set to rhyme. For a monument suitable for a savoured son, to acknowledge
The tall and short stories from our misadventures and past glories, what the money from this man had done.
make the hearts of your readership, recalibrate and chime.
He built a cathedral and churches to the glory of God, a Girls’
One thing that us writers would like to imprint, when E-Muse puts school, a Boys’ school, then an almshouse got the nod,
the sinews of our verse views in to print, But now with ‘Black Lives Matter’ he’s a lightning rod.
When our lines are seen alongside the greats in our trade, it gives Might there be a re-imagining, a reconciled reprieve, for history
our biros a boost in life’s grand parade. can’t suit all of us, but it must be allowed to breath.
Well, your flyover’s in lockdown but your commission’s a cinch,
Our First Five Star General of eMuse…. Wally Finch. So let’s show the other side of the coin, show the bleeding heart
that’s torn apart and worn,
And let it rise parallel… akimbo to that one you scourge and scorn,
As we celebrate and recalibrate, consecrate and mourn,
To balance both sides of the story and let the truth be born.
Let’s Balance Both Sides of the Story Be mindful whilst sieving the grains of gold from the depths of our
deepest dredges,
The Monumental Miasma in Our Midst That that truth might not ride on the coin’s either side, but there,
centre square, on its edges .
“We’ve recast a bronze of the bastard” they said, “upside down in
a cold riverbed”,
Pretty soon the slave trader, Edward Colston, lay dead, sinner or There is something in all of us that wants to hear only what we
saint with a price on his head,
With a noose lampooned around his hawker’s neck, bound down want to believe. Of course we need to look at history as it was,
in Bristol Harbour . warts and all. Destruction of monuments, choreographed riots,
civil unrest, and, opportunistic looting won’t help. Anger behind
Local idol, paternalist, he ruled the slave trade with an iron lined fist, the currant buzz words in the slogan “Black lives matter” is very
Clamped down… tramped down, serving terror on a twist, real and understandable. But is the world of people badly done
Eighty-four thousand on his passengers’ list, misery merging in a by restricted to black people? Surely “ALL lives matter.” Don’t
transatlantic mist, protest! Vote!
A classic coup for a capitalist gone aground in Bristol Harbour.
Wally
July 2020 eMuse 5