Like many people around the globe, I share the hope that these may be last days of ole '45, the incumbent in the White House. Polls are continuing to favour Mr Biden both nationally and in key swing states. If they hold and if they are not in error again, then he will become the 46th President of the United States next week. Of course, 45 could try to stage some kind of coup by claiming electoral fraud and many of his supporters could flood the streets in protest. There are quite a few scenarios in which 45 could cause trouble and I don't doubt that he is up for it. If the result is decisive, this rear-guard action will be much harder to pull off and the Republican Party might decide to grow a spine, once again.

Meanwhile, folks understandably fret at the chance of a recurrence of the 2016 result. There most certainly is a chance (currently around 12% by 538's reckoning) that 45 could lose the popular vote and yet win again through the Electoral College. But things have to go just right for him and there must be another polling error in his favour.

Even if he loses, the ghost of 45 will linger in the White House and in American politics for some time to come. It is an odious thought to say the least. A poet has written,

"Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away..."

The long shadows of past presences are there for us all really. But in this case especially, they may not be benign.

Since the end of World War 2, the greatest threat to human survival has not come from climate change (though that is serious indeed) nor pandemics. It has not come from space rocks or solar flares, nor from cosmic radiation, overpopulation or food shortages. Nor has it come from volcanism, tsunamis or earthquakes. Rather, the greatest threat has come from nuclear weapons.

Seventy-five years on and the world is no closer to solving this most dangerous dilemma. Treaties to reduce the potential threat have come and gone, one Cold War has passed and yet the major nuclear powers are engaging in a modernisation program that will render the danger greater than before.

The other day the fiftieth signatory to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was made, by Honduras, I believe. Astonishingly, yes astonishingly, Australia is NOT one of those signatories. I can only think that we are bowing, yet again, to pressure from Washington. What a pismire response from Canberra. Shameful, abject and embarrassing.

I have heard the argument that nuclear weapons saved us all from a major war. I have not been convinced by the evidence (largely based on the observation that there has not been a major war, so nuclear weapons must be the reason for that) and even if I accept such an argument, its frail logic only has to fail ONCE for the calamity to be upon us. That almost happened a few times during the Cold War.

So I salute the fifty nations who have so far signed up and pray that the weaklings and cowards who run this country decide to step up for a change.

Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, said afterwards,

"When I had learned that we had reached our 50th ratification, I was not able to stand. I remained in my chair and put my head in my hands and I cried tears of joy."

 I woke up this morning with a line of poetry in my head, I forgot the line almost immediately but remembered the poet, Bruce Dawe. Dawe is not a forgettable poet - he has many memorable lines of verse - but my waking mind was about something that I didn't quite understand.

So I googled Dawe to see if he was still alive, only to find that somehow, I had missed his passing last April. He was 90, a ripe age, as they say, but I wondered how I hadn't heard or read about his departure. It seemed odd as I am attuned to such events. I had taught Dawe as an HSC poet in senior English classes and I enjoyed teaching him because, students liked him. And they got him.

Dawe makes his genial turn of phrase, his song of the Australian vernacular, seem so easy to do. His subject matter was typical of what concerned 'ordinary people', cornflakes stuck to kitchen walls for example, but his writing was deceptive in this sense. I tried writing in the fashion of Dawe when I was teaching him only to come a cropper. It's not easy at all.

I remember being at a party of arty folk in the 1990's and chatting to a published poet. I mentioned Dawe as someone I regarded as important to the cause of poetry only to be met with a half sneer. Said poet then pulled a sheaf of poems from his cloak (I jest, they were in a folder) and let me read them. His work was erudite, intense and opaque. He had a vast command of the most arcane vocabulary. Even though I knew the subject from the title, the meaning of the poems was never clear, lost in the tight, self-enclosing world of the abstruse. I said some kind words about his obvious skill as a poet and left it at that. I didn't want to read any more because his work was a dry as a bone.

Poems should be challenging, their compression of language and literary devices making us think, and then think again. Bruce Dawe's work did not take a lot of unravelling but it challenged students to think how poetry can say something meaningful even as it is comprehensible.

Vale Bruce Dawe.

This morning I was the sole swimmer at my local pool. The weather was cool, misty and drizzly but the pool water was warm. Steam was rising from it's surface as I prepared for my first immersion into its aqua stillness.

Swimming in the mist in the mountains is pretty special, the elements combining to create a soothing, even romantic backdrop. If you could apply a calamine to the soul, then this would be it.

But something quite unusual heightened this already bucolic moment. As I was nearing the end of my swim, a lone piper sounded up from the adjacent bushland. I don't mean the bird variety, no, for it was a man playing the bagpipes. His plaintiff tunes resounded about the valley in which the pool sits, the mist and light rain adding to the illusion that this humble part of Lawson was actually a Scottish glen.

He played on and as I went to my car, I could see him nestled up in one of the old picnic huts near Wilson Park. I hope he comes again.

Birthday Song

Before the Mini-Minor there was me,
Small and struggling in a foreign place,
My ending almost came before, you see,
A clinic, an appointed time, the space
To see me off to nothingness.
Perhaps I'm lucky, or just blessed,

However contrived within this race,

A million billion stars coalesce,

The making of such randomness.
If life is given, then it's given free,
To make a mark upon a family tree.

frail conversation
the unspooled lines invisibly real,
rendering such words

The road-side fence is smothered in the white bells of the wonga vine. Our front porch is a sea of swaying jasmine. The plum trees have flowered, the blossoms have fallen and are now in early leaf. My mind, focussed as it is on the seasons, was drawn to a short poem by Meng Haoran, one of the Tang Dynasty superstars of poetry.

Spring Morning

Spring, I am half asleep and do not feel the dawn
But everywhere black birds are crying
Last night I heard the howling wind and rain
Do you know how many blossoms fell?

 We have fallen into a time of lovely spring weather, the days mild and sunny, the nights cool. The garden is alive with insects and birds, all of whom appear to sense that the moment is now and should not be missed, for there may not be another. It's a kind of "gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old Time is still a-flying" point in the yearly cycle, understood instinctively in the natural world. Humans, who are becoming less in tune in spite of aeons of being, need a shove to remember what they are increasingly losing.

October is a different kind of month in the Northern Hemisphere, where autumn is settling upon the landscape. Apparently it is a month for political surprises too, one thinks of the Comey email imbroglio in 2016 which may have cost Clinton the election in the US. Australia is not immune to scandal or controversy - the current Premier of NSW is embroiled in a scandal over an ill-conceived romance with a dubious former MP.

It is easy to throw stones and from what I've heard, many have been hurled before a thought is given to the action. It is the time we are in perhaps, of instant judgement, made possible by social media, anonymity and the rise of the irrational. Readers will know that I do bang on about these things periodically.

But really, I would just welcome a return to the considered opinion. Ideas expressed calmly and rationally. Disagreements between mutually respectful parties argued out reasonably. The volume to be turned down a notch or two.

 R.S Thomas was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who has a strong dislike of the manner in which Wales had been anglicised. It is often the destiny of smaller nations that are consumed or are in the thrall of larger states to suffer such a fate, though the Welsh have fought back with attempts to preserve their language and cultural heritage.

It is not Thomas's nationalism that I want to salute today, but his capacity as a poet to observe and capture the moment, splendidly. This one is about autumn and while it is spring here, the theme of recollection is universal.

A Day in Autumn

It will not always be like this,

The air windless, a few last

Last leaves adding their decoration

To the trees shoulders, braiding the cuffs

Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn's mirror. Having looked up

From the day's chores, pause a minute,

Let the mind take its photograph

Of the bright scene, something to wear

Against the heart in the long cold.

"Thought I saw at my feet an origami crow

It was only the street hidden under the snow"

Good verse does not have to be obscure, or allusive, or clever in its use of devices. It can, as the lines from Aimee Mann's Snow Goose Cone demonstrate, simply be a deft observation about the world, or perhaps immersion in the inner life of a character. It might be both of these and other things too.

Mann is actually a very good song-writer who takes the artform seriously, crafting words, no doubt with many revisions, before she begins to set music to it. Or perhaps she has a tune in snatches in her head, and the words flow from it. There is a wonderful tension between the music and the lyric, at least, for Mann there is.

It is really just too easy to turn out endless cliches in popular music, the dross being hidden, often as not, behind layers of sound and production. I think that good writing should be able to stand on its own merits, collected and read like poetry, even if it remains a kind of poor cousin.

It is interesting, even if a little maudlin, to wonder how long the mark of humans will remain after our extinction. As a tool using and now technological species, humans have come to dominate the Earth with all manner of artificially created objects. Look around.

But most of what has been made or built will be gone in a million years and an intelligent life-form visiting the planet in a billion years would find nothing to show that once mighty civilisations lived here.

However there are at least five objects, currently speeding through or beyond the Kuiper belt, that may live for billions of years. These are the two Pioneer and Voyager probes and the New Horizons spacecraft. They are hurtling in different directions and without meeting some calamity, carry the best hope to show that humans once existed. Sure their power will give out long before that, but they will be intact creations shuttling through the darkness, nevertheless. And all, bar New Horizons, carry some kind of message about their creators.

Hoping that one will be captured by an advanced alien species, should one exist, is a very long bet indeed. Imagine being stranded on that proverbial desert island and sending a message in a bottle on the tide with the hope that it will be found and read by one specific person someday. Similar odds, I think.

Bon Voyage!

Courtesy of NASA.

October comes and finds the unwanted shells of cicadas awash on the ground, or clinging like ancient corpses to trees. The cicadas themselves are busy evading birds or signalling their presence with a high-pitched buzzing.

And, of course, there is me in the garden, digging out the many shoots of new bamboo that have survived the massive harvest of the central stand on my neighbours property. Surely the Vietcong learnt the lesson of tunnelling and re-emerging in a new location from watching bamboo. I swear that it grows while my back is turned!

October is often a surprising month. Being the middle month of Spring, it can put on a burst of heat or just as easily a cool snap. Bushfires can get going in October under the right conditions. It is a doorway to the summer, beginning with school holidays and ending with the onset of daylight saving.

Despite the difficulties of the past seven months, I nominate October as a month of hope. And joy!