– Bruce Dawe

For Big Jim Phelan

When children are born in Victoria

they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,

having already begaun a lifetime's barracking.

Carn, they cry, Carn … feebly at first

while paretns playfully tussle with them

for possession of a rusk: Ah, he's a little Tiger! (And they are …)

Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game

they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming

towards the daylight's roaring empyream

Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture,

they break surface and are forever lost,

their minds rippling out like streamers

In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice

like the voice of God booms from the stands

Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed.

Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat,

they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints

and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven,

And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team's fortunes

- the reckless proposal after the one-point win,

the wedding and honeymoon after the grand-final …

They will not grow old as those from the more northern States grow old,

for them it will always be three-quarter-time

with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term,

That pattern persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons,

enabling old-timers by boundary fences to dream of resurgent lions

and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present,

So that mythology may be perpetually renewed

and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god

in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing

But the dance forever the same - the elderly still

loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end,

having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation