Moving Day
Following the soldiers back home
Along the track from Bruce
Came a ragtag troupe of ‘carnies’...
Not fit for His Majesty’s boots.
They crossed the River Namoi
At the town of Jindalee,
out back of the Mallee stoop.
There, the humble circus
It brought them all out
To help them with their war;
A wall,
Of pain and shattered truth
Young Jimmie Malone
Didn’t feel right, at home, these days
As he searched for life
Deep in his sad father’s eyes.
His Dad, Bert,
disconnected,
At best,
No matter how hard he’d tried.
Had said he wanted
To go to the circus...
Jimmie knew in his heart that
He'd lied.
Sgt Malone, as feared,
Winced at every crack
Of the showman’s whip
So employed to teach
An unwilling beast to dance;
The tortured lion
Roared back its’ discontent
As Bert’s head regaled
In battlefield noise
With random addled rants
Another soldier, Murph,
Reported daily to Nell’s bar
Ensconced there,
Safe from all the hullabaloo
The white tiles clean
A refuge serene,
For the needy
Solitary, few.
By the third whiskey chaser
A warm friend arrived; enter
This fond and calming ‘bracer’
Alone on his boarded porch later
Malone sat restless
And staring,
Lost in his own drinking time.
Instinctively fearing,
A circumspect vigil for
‘Next orders, Sergeant’
To filter down a distant line.
Despair silently, but surely, negating,
Life’s mandate...
A subconscious ...somehow waiting?
Young Jim was seen about
As the clan,
Had left, disorderly,down the one shabby street
The weathered parade passing
With the odd thankful wave
As it rattled o’er the dusty peat.
The boy, meantime, tried
to quiet his racing mind
Stowed, safe, beneath
A sturdy waggon seat
And as the two serviceman
Again, searched their glasses deep
For answers to their plight;
The circus meandered
Out toward the Barwon Plains,
For a matinee show next night.
The lion trussed in a wooden crate;
The performers bedraggled along;
Their eyes locked on the trail up ahead
The odd one humming a hopeful song...
And so on they went
One day at a time,
A ritual of the ages
In an attempt to somehow
Rewrite over time
The story
Of their pages.
Leaving behind this weary day
A new life to begin
Far from dark provost,
Cruel discontent,
Of faceless, driven men
Grahame J Flynn Views in Verse
