In The Light Of Burnt Lime

LIME - burning lime


our noses were too clean
with white powder

with too white powder - the biting
alkaloid talcum of Lilydale
was agricultural lime,
powdered burnt-lime

and used by the local ton
on the farm skin,
spread to conform all rank growths
with an oxide - making

a caustic climate which blew
down the familiar winds as air
we breathed -like feelings burnt
off- in those longreaches of soul,
stretched out, then branded
by one’s father’s scorn

any slight love - like rain,
any show of affection -
any unwanted eye-moisture,
would turn our lime heated,
and a glare would grow out of
public sight - a chemistry of fear,
so, fear mongered, fear flared
in our poor heritage vats,
and then, the family hopper,
empty of other largesse,
could only give scorn to
all it did not, wanted not
to understand

this alkaline culture
was, of a course, chock
full of antipathy to fame.

Pah! that any of us
should seek, let alone
have any limelight!

we were raised as if
fame was the thing we
were most in danger of

as if what we most needed
was the purging burn
of scorn, children raised
on the alka-line of
negligence, burnt off
from any flowering -
by a generous limelight
of the scorn
we covered ourselves in

white was pure:
If you drew attention
to yourself you got
belted to the white

mock acid: opposite acid
if you made sensitive art
or wit
you were mocked

not just mocked, the word
scorn seems apt. A word that
appears to have grown of a scar
- a joining of alkaline burns

I myself learnt not
to seek the limelight,
not any limelight! it was
no blacker not to try

I was a mock scholar,
a mock son, mock sibling.
unhappy at home.
unhappy at school.

I couldn't see any reason
to be notable or for why
I should apply myself...

so much lime was applied
I was lilywhite in scorn

scolded in scorn -
in shire-proud lime -
any live plant in the way
was burnt

as the spreader blanketed
its white alkaline cosmetic
in concentrated caustic and
the hydrogen ions re shaped
the familiar landscape,

nothing could get
to be puffed up or be
allowed to be boosted except
the ph measure of our
home-grown fine-wrought
poppyseed-tilth of soil.

I did want to be tall, but to opine,
or to be notable, got you burned.

- flowers were picked in the bud.
- notoriety got you in glaring trouble.

we never let
real poppies grow,
so then we never had problems
with any too tall

we just withered all
desire for the limelight
in the scornful blanket
of local infamy

like Mum the amateur thinker
scornful of all those
paid intellectuals as the most
educated of idiots when what
she wanted most desperately was
to have had an education

or brother Melvyn deriding
the mudbrick of artists at Monbulk
when he wanted to be
an artist in kites like Hargreaves

or Dad's Philistine laughter at
the poor Jewish boy who reddened into
blood visions of mad poems under the
mulching grindstones of berried straws

that reminds me of
one of Dad's old histories: -
the family son told in a biting boast
how his brother, my Uncle Jack,
as a boy would climb up high
out to jump from a branch
of a tree in their creekdam,
saying: "Look at me!"
wanting attention like a human,
but Dad, with his sister & brothers
proudly scorned and reviled Jack
up his needy box, at pains
to scorch his pluck,
they turned their backs on him
in scorn - as if
he was showing his willy.

so the lime spread, and
spread lime whited us out
over broad shouldered acres

'Fame' was for others,
just as light was not for us

It was better to be cowed
denied, to an ignoble common
of a caustic limed dirt...

like public infamy only
far more cosmetic.



Wayne David Knoll © Saturday 14th December 1996