Frank The Poet
(to Frank MacNamara, 1811-1861)

Rapists, murderers, slanderers, them,
(the homeless, the hungry, the 'troublesome', shoo!)
threw them together and sent to Australia
the worst and the trodden, who had one thing in common,
they knew who they were; condemned and forgotten,
the punks, rabid angry and patent insane
(so sayeth the Crown, and its Bloody Laws, too.)

By rights they should have done themselves in
to the last mate, the lot of them cleared off the table;
not a good word was said for the bunch, fully expected
to lunch on each other, to toss empty plates
on the midden of history and, by sundown,
know who they were, and their miserable fate.

Didn't quite work out that way. Penal colonies baked
on the land, confinements more or less held sway
till escapes and what else that their fortunes had staked
set them wandering far from prediction; a different road ,
and all the difference that would make; a road endured,
until the first postmaster, first novelist, first brewer
emerged, and others in that catalog of slow penal tenure;
those that strayed far from the opinion of others;
they knew what they did, they knew who they were;
and the ones that survived, knew what to do.

And the poet among them who said what he said;
a wordsmith who knew who his gaolers were, too.
He knew them so well and so well-chose his words
in the fashion of orders for a transport they'd earned;
he'd paint them with word into cells they deserved
and condemn his accusers to brimstone and hell,
where all those he named (and they knew who they were)
were the ones "Frank the Poet"* knew well.



fr. "Frank the Poet" ©red slider, 2011. All rights reserved.