Welcome to Poetry Friday. It is a beautiful time of year here in Australia, with blue skies, days warm enough to swim, flowers blooming, birds singing, and school holidays and Christmas rapidly approaching. Makes me glad to be alive – and to be Australian. This week, as I’ve been walking, the words of Dorothea Mackellar’s poem about the country, have been going through my head, so I thought I might share two extracted stanzas today:
by Dorothea Mackellar
Stanza 2
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
Stanza 6
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
(You can read the full poem here. To learn more about the poem and the poet, you can visit the official website).
As is often the case with very famous poems, My Country has been used as a model for new poems, and parodied over and over again. Is this a bad thing? Not in my book. When we tak something familiar and use it as a writing exercise, or to make a statement, we connect with readers with an additional layer of meaning, My favourite parody of My Country is Oscar Krahnvohl’s version, which begins:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of open drains
Mid-urban sprawl expanded
For cost-accounting gains;
Broad, busy bulldozed acres
Once wastes of fern and trees
Now rapidly enriching
Investors overseas.
and conlcudes, in a stanza I find fitting given recent racist rallies in Australia:
A democratic country!
Where, safe from fear’s attacks
Earth’s children all are equal
(Save yellows, browns and blacks).
Though Man in Space adventure,
Invade the planets nine,
What shall we find to equal
This sunburnt land of mine?
(You can find the whole poem here.)
Do you have a favourite poem parody? I’d love to hear about it.
In the meantime, if you are looking for more poetry goodness, today’s Poetry Friday roundup is being hosted by Carol’s Corner. 