No Message

This is another of my favourite Poets
Mary Hannay Foote.
Australia 1846-1918.
She is a diamond.
A Glasgow lass with a big heart.
Now listen to her words and tell if you feel and see that heartfelt message
She created for that waiting lassie.

No Message.

She heard the story of the end,
each message,too,she heard;
and there was one for every friend;
for her alone, no word.

And shall she bear a heavier heart,
and deem his love was fled.
Because his soul from earth could part
leaving her name unsaid?

No! No though neither sign nor sound
A parting thought expressed,
Not heedless passed the homeward bound
of her he loved the best.

Of voyage-perils, bravely borne,
he would not tell the tale,
of shattered planks and canvas torn,
and war with wind and gale.

He waited till the light-house star
should rise against the sky;
and from the mainland,  looming far
the forest scents blow by.

He waited to tell, assurance sweet,
that pain and grief were o'er.
What blessings haste the soul to meet.,
Ere yet within the door.

Then one farewell he thought to speak.
When all the rest were past,
As in that parting-hour we seek
the dearest hand the last.

And while for this delaying but
to see heavens open gate,
Lo, it received him - and was shut
Ere he could say I wait.

A memory from the past
Mary Hannay Foote.

Be safe Agman

Do They Think That I Do not Know.?

What's Cooking?

Henry Lawson

1867-1922





They say  that I have never written of love
as a writer of songs should do,
They say I have never touched the strings
with a touch which is firm and true.
They say I know nothing of women and me
in fields where love's roses grow.
they say I must write with a halting pen.

Do you think that I do not know?

When love's first burst came to me,
in days when our hair was brown
and the hem of her skirt was a sacred thing
and her hair was a angels crown.
The shock when another man touched her arm,
where the dancer sat around in a row.
the hope and despair and false alarm.

Do you think that I do not know?

They say I have never written of love,
they say my heart is such,
that the finer feelings are for above.
But a writer may know too much
there are darkest depth in the brightest nights
when the clustering stars hang low.
There are things it would break his strong heart to write.

Do you think that I do not know?

Written by a poignant Australian.

Who was it who said "Aussies can only swat flies"
how do you like those apples?

The picture came off off  a magazine I got at a news stand in Melbourne "Jolliffe's Outback" I loved the humour, he was also a great talent.
Born in England, Died in Australia aged 94 years in Nov 2001.

Really do you think I do not know?
Agman.

In Time of Drought in that Never Never Land

That lovely lady from March house books opened some memories for me today by posting a comment,  blowing me away and sent me scurrying for my flying kit in my garage, and there it was my first poetry book I bought it in Melbourne, as a student, and carried it in the plane with me for more years than I'd like to say, it's called "Bush Ballads" a very plain looking book, sunburned pink in colour (possible it was red when I got it,) by various authors, published by W.P Nimmo. Hay & Mitchell Ltd.

It is full of my little notes explaining what I though of each verse and there were loads of them.
In particular on page 73 is the "Never Never Country" by Australian poet, "Henry Lawson".
All those years ago I had marked three verses so With your kind permission I will repeat them here, only the 3 verses that is, there are 10 of them, so here go's.

By the homestead, hut, and shearing shed,
by railway, coach and track.
by lonely graves of our brave dead,
up country and out back;
To where beneath glorious clustered stars
the dreamy plains expand
my home lies wide a thousand miles
In that never never land.

It lies beyond the farming belt.
wide wastes of scrub and plain,
A blazing desert in the drought,
a lake-land after rain.
To the sky line sweeps the waving grass,
or swirls the scorching sand.
A phantom land, a mystic land.
the never never land.

Where lone Mount Desolation lies,
Mounts Dreadful and despair
tis lost beneath the rainless skies,
in hopeless desert there.
It spreads nor-west by no man's land
where clouds are seldom seen to where the cattle stations lie.
Three hundred miles between.

Henry Lawson June 1867-Sept 1922. Remembered by me.

This still works for me, a mystic land that I've been privileged to see.

Agman

True blue from the bush.

good  day.

I received this e-mail from a friend in Australia
to-day and felt it was worth a share.
It was sent to me because my friend knows where my heart is.

The outback!

Life in the Australian Army

A friend in Aussie, Who comes from Eromanga a small town, West of Quilpie  in the far south west of Queensland,   It comes from a young soldier to Mum and Dad.

Dear Mum and Dad

I am well, Hope youse are too, tell me big brothers Doug and Phil that the army is better than working on the farm, tell them to get in bloody quick smart before the jobs are gone! I wuz a bit slow in settling down at first, because ya don't hafta get out of bed until 06.00am.
But I like sleeping in now, cuz all ya gotta do before brekky is make your bed and shine your uniform.
No bloody cows to milk or calves to feed, no feed to stack nothing!
Ya haz got to shower though! but its not so bad coz there's lotsa hot water,  even a light to see what your doing.

At brekky ya get cereal, fruit and eggs but there's no Kangaroo steak or possum stew like wot Mum makes.
You don't get fed again until noon and by the time  all the cities boys are buggered because we've been on a route march!
Geeze it's only just like walking to the windmill in the back paddock!

This one will kill me brothers, Doug and Phil.
I keep getting medals for shooting, dunno why?
The bulleye is a big as a Possums bum and it don't move an it's not firing back at you, like that day the Johnsons did when our big scrubber bull got into their prize cows before the big show last year.
All you have to do is make yourself comfortable and hit the target " it's a piece of piss"!

You don't even have to load your own cartridges, they come in little boxes, and ya don't have to steady yourself against the roll of the Roo shooting truck when you reload.

Sometimes ya gotta wrestle with the city boys and I gotta be real careful coz they break real easy, it's a bit like fighting with Doug and Phil and Jack  and Steve and Muzza and Boori , all at once, at home after muster.

Turns out I'm not a bad boxer either and it looks like I'm the best the platoon's got, I've only been beaten by one bloke from the Engineers and he was 6 foot 5 and 15 stone and three pick handels across the shoulders and as you know I'm only 5 foot 7 and eight stone wringing wet! but I fought him til the other blokes carried me off to the boozer.
I can't complain about the army tell the boys to get in quick before the word gets around how bloody easy and good it is.


Your loving daughter.

Sheila.

Agman

DNA (to be or not to be)

Goodnight

 

When I  wrote my last post.
It was just something I picked up on and thought I'd blog it. but after I wrote about 6 pages! I realised it is an never ending story and I decided to leave it to somebody who could do the subject justice and included it in a book?
 so I backed away from the subject and posted that last blog.

Now After reading through my notes I realised how important it really is, many of our general everyday illness's, heart attacks, general cancers, breast. eye problems, bone problems, and in what direction your development  as a human-being would go, will be effected.
You name it, it all seems to be linked in some way.
It all seemed to start for me with some scientist saying "DNA is a billion times more accurate than finger prints",
Now forgive me for saying "but does that mean the finger print was not as accurate as they first thought? and loads of people were jailed and executed because of it".
Now I can't for the life of me, support  anybody being incarcerated  or treated improperly if the only evidence is,only DNA or only finger prints, just in case it turns out to be not so accurate, in a few years time?
Let me just  give you my forecast for the future, lets just go forward 100 years and use one aspect and there are hundreds in the DNA stories.
A young lady goes into the hospital for a DNA test, as she has just recently discovered she was pregnant.

In the year 2113 it is mandatory in our country to get a DNA check as soon as she knows she is pregnant.
The test only takes a few minutes, if the foetus passe's the current minimum standards that's fine, but if baby doesn't? your given a tablet similar to the morning after pill) that is on the market here and now! But more sophisticated with no side effects.
The Mother will have no idea? or she will have been convinced that having a baby with a faulty gene is not what she wants.
DNA scanning will be wide-spread within the highly technical societies, (Ones with money).
Even if her baby passe's the genetic test the baby will be monitored for the rest of it's life, as the Mother and Father and the rest of the population are.
There may be scanners on the doorway of building for identification which randomly check your DNA for any changes at the same time,  (Rogue genes).
Which may be used on job applications, medical aid, the list is endless.

The long term effects may be a reduced population, and the freeing up of busy hospitals, because many of the general illness's and old age induced illness's (Alzheimer's, Arthritis, Parkinson's, and so on the list is endless,) will be virtually none existent.
Due to the DNA testing and scanning which will have wiped out the faulty genes in our gene pool of our country, after a period they may decide to go a step further and start changing our genes to make us more productive for what ever job of work they decide for us.
"Never happen you say" just think what our Politicians are up to now, "what do you think they will be up too in 100 years time"?
You may say that doesn't sound so bad! if it wipes out decease! Well I would agree except for the  babies who are put down, before having any life, on the off  chance that they may get a illness.
Hitler tried the same thing in the 1940s.
This is crazy and never ending so I'll quit now and leave you with this.
It's the thin end of the wedge! and only one of them.

Goodnight.
Agman.

Can you be born bad

good morning

I was just trolling through G+ share and I saw a small statement, basically saying, "a baby is not born bad, it is the influence of his mother and father  and what it learns  from its parents"  that changed it.
Well that may be true.
It also mentioned that if the baby was never  influenced by it's bad parents, it would grow up without these bad traits?
With that in mind, lets just remember the baby is made up of parts of his parents.
Genetically speaking! the babies genes are sub-units of the DNA and similar to their parents and they may have that one gene that is predisposed to violence and mayhem, so isolating the baby from its evil parents and placing the baby with  goody goody two shoes foster parents, may be a wasted exercise.
One day I'm sure this may be a proven fact after they check all the genes to a greater depth and the sub-unites of the sub-units of the DNA we may see a different story in the future.
Which will lead to adopting parents looking for babies without these genetic traits, as some do now with medical problems and education and looks.
Just think you may not be able to get a job without first undergoing a DNA test and have a card to show as proof of passing such a test.
How do you like them apples?

Agman

Guardian " Angel" Imaginary friends, Spirit guides.

Oh  shit

Guardians "Angels"?
Spirit guides?
Your unseen friend?
Teachers?
Your conscience? or whatever name you use, I'm sure you have heard of one of these terms. Do you think they are real?

Did you have one when you were young ? do you have one now?
Can you see him? or her? or is it a creature?
How did you first become aware.?
Do you speak to him? or her? or it? or do you just hear them?

My reason for asking is, the other day I witnessed an accident.
A young man walked out on to the road into the traffic and was struck down by a car killing him instantly.

As I walked away from this tragic scene I heard a lady in the crowd say " Why didn't his Guardian Angel stop him?" I took her words with me as I walked away.

That night I was reflecting on what she had said, and I wondered if I had ever had an encounter with a guardian, because of my job, dodging tragedy was a daily thing,  so if they do exist? surely I would have attracted one or two by now?
So I decided to go through my log books where my memories reside just to see if I had made any "weird happenings" notes.

Two came to mind straight away, the first was when I was flying  in the Southern Sudan, when I was approached by a marine Padre that I thought I knew in Vietnam but in fact I knew nothing about him and he influenced me, I mentioned this incident in my blog "Two Nuns in Africa" so I won't go over it again.

The second was Vietnam.
I was sent out to pick up two guys from a strip in hostile territory at dawn, so off I went in the Cessna 337, no worries just a quick turn around and back to base, I noticed the ground crew had placed a lunch pack in the back.
It would seem these guys to be picked up, had been on the run for days without weapons or food, that was not so good for them, but for me it meant a light pickup, which translates to short take off. (got to be a good omen)
I landed and jumped out to open the rear door, two guys immediately burst from the bush and dived into the rear compartment.
I closed the door, jumped back into the seat and gunned the engines for full power and we were away.

Just as we cleared the tree's  over the the end of the strip, fate stepped in and it all turned to worms.
The aircraft was racked in small arms fire, the rear engine immediately started banging,  I tried feathering the prop,but nothing happened, it was winding around like a big drag machine stealing all my flying speed,
But this is not the end of the world! if I pull up the landing gear I should get enough speed to fly home, on the front engine.

Just as this thought was passing through my mind, (at a great rate of knots) my only engine started to lose power.
My promised mortality was starting to show it's ugly face.
I placed a Mayday call," pick up complete Agman," giving my intention to attempt a landing on bald hill, or we will be along a straight line with bald hill and the strip. Look for the smoke!

The map of the area was imprinted in my mind, it told me there was a bald hill just a few clicks directly ahead, it was one of my emergency landing or crash sites I had picked out.

I gently raised the flaps out of their drag range and slowly lowered the nose and nipped a couple of knots increase in my speed, we were skimming along the top of the trees, and I'm sure we were getting a bit of ground effect lift, as I couldn't climb out of it's effect.
As the engine power continued to fail.
I had decided to go with my training and dip one of my wings into the trees, the idea being! it would rip off the wing, slow down the aircraft and it would drop down to the floor of the jungle giving the best chance of survival.
I would really have to take a deep breath to do this, because deep down it was only a theory and I had never met anybody who had tried it or survived it.
At that very moment the engine failed and we dropped into the tree tops, and then we were clear with the bald hill in front of us, covered in shell holes.
I shut off the fuel, and dumped the flap and shaved 10 knots off of our forward speed, but we going in hard, more down than forward.
First contact with the ground and by some miracle the undercarriage legs bounced us back in the air, only up to about 5 feet and then one leg dropped off, second contact with the ground was with one leg and the same side wing and that was it, we spun around into a shell hole and stopped.
I was stunned but my mind was shouting "Fire get out now!"
I gently opened my door and stood out, I was okay.
I went to open the rear doors and saw the bullet holes along the side of the plane, only one had struck the main engine( Lucky shot) but the rear had at least 6 hits and the rear door had a couple in it, opening the door I saw them both still in the same position as when they jumped in, no surprise really the whole episode only took 4 minutes.
I shook them and said "come on, all this ole girl wants to do now is burn, lets go" I grabbed a pair of legs and pulled them until he was clear of the aircraft I went back for the other guy and and shouted "shit! come on, do you want to burn? wake up" I pulled him out and onto the ground, that was when I noticed the blood on the floor of the plane,
A closer look revealed he had taken a shot to the tummy and one onto the chest, there was nothing to do here.
I turned to the other fellow, shook him back to reality and said "come on, we have to get out of here" He staggered over to his mate and said "no! we can't leave him yet, we can drag him clear" I said are you crazy? he's dead, we can't help him" he said "yes I can, help me move him"?.
So we dragged his body away best we could, by now I was getting ready to run, the guy had no dog tags, nothing and panic was starting to set in for me, being this close to a exploding aircraft was not a good idea.
This guy started praying over his mate, he had a strange accent made me think Polish.
He got up quickly and said "we can go now" so we ran and jumped into a crater.
I asked "what did he mean by, now we can go" he said "he didn't want to leave him alone until his spirit had left his body!
I replied "sarcastically, so you can see his spirit leave his body can you? " "Yes" he replied, "as a matter of fact I can"

Now you got to admit this is weird, but truthfully I saw nothing
and didn't really think much about it until now, apart from making a log book note. I just thought he was a fruit cake.

Within a short while, I was pleased to hear the beat of the helicopter
which had us back in base and into debriefing.
A gunship appeared and fired on my aircraft setting it on fire, you could see that ole girl (that saved our lives) burning from miles away.
I never saw or found out who those two guys were, nobody seem to know? rumour had it, they were deserter from the North seeking asylum but who knows,  just another adventure? or was that guy a guardian angel? who knows? I don't.

Do you have an imaginary friend?

I take my life one day at a time.

Agman.

A post worthy of a visit

Good-day to you.

I just thought this is worthy of a mention, it's a post that I visit that gives me great pleasure, the colour, illustrations and subject matter are great. and
If you've ever wondered? where  children go when they dream visit this post.
"Sharon Sunlit Memories"


Oh dear, on a starry starry night, with the moon and stars shining bright.
Why is it that I can not see?
Little fairies flying high in the sky over me.
Their winged horses are just a dream to me,
for the fairy Queen's magic let's no adult see.
So I must wait, for that special day,
when all will be revealed to me.
That happy day, when they will come to take me away.


Agman.