Today’s poem is by Australian poet Michael Dransfield (1948-1973):

Chaconne
The most significant fact about this room is that nothing else
exists. Beyond the walls, nothing. Outer space, perhaps, infinite
and invisible. The windows are mirrors. Why look out when one
can look in?
There is no furniture. It is more amusing to imagine new, different
fittings each day, than it would be to wake to the same shapes,
colours, textures. Today, next year,
yesterday, it is one. On a wall – or is it the floor – is a clock
I built once, or shall build, or am building. Its hands are
identical / their mute semaphore. Opposite, a pool of green,
blue, sometimes colourless liquid, sometimes reflects and
sometimes invents.
I think of this room as a filing-cabinet, a memory bank where the
history of fantasy is stored. The fantasy is history. Dreams are
sculptures, names are poems, nobody comes for there is no-one else,
and nowhere from which to come. Proust, de Vigny, Owen Aherne,
my identities are interchangeable. The mind is an entertainment,
a circus where philosophers perform. I inhabit the drawing room
Rimbaud imagined at the
bottom of a lake, purple tincture of opium. And identical self
represents me on the previous planet, they will not
notice I have gone. It is difficult sometimes
for me to remember that I too am imaginary. The world has
neither ended nor begun / creativity and hallucination /
perhaps a huge joke gone awry,
a lysergic acid rave, Robinson Crusoe on the wrong island.
But still an island, bounded by seas I shall never sail.
Solitudes. Pacing impatiently
the cage of body, of self. An exit glitters brightly in my hand.

 
Reference:
Thomas W. Shapcott (Editor) [1970]: Australian Poetry Now. Melbourne, Australia: Sun Books, p. 206.

Another great poem by Judith Wright (1915-2000), clearly influenced by the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose rhythm was influenced by the triple repetitions of Robert Southwell).  She captures here particularly well the change in mood of the Australian beach after sunset but before dark.

The Surfer
He thrust his joy against the weight of the sea;
climbed through, slid under those long banks of foam –
(hawthorn hedges in spring, thorns in the face stinging).
How his brown strength drove through the hollow and coil
of green-through weirs of water!
Muscle of arm thrust down long muscle of water;
and swimming so, went out of sight
where mortal, masterful, frail, the gulls went wheeling
in air as he in water, with delight.
Turn home, the sun goes down; swimmer, turn home.
Last leaf of gold vanishes from the sea-curve.
Take the big roller’s shoulder, speed and swerve;
come to the long beach home like a gull diving.
For on the sand the grey-wolf sea lies snarling,
cold twilight wind splits the waves’ hair and shows
the bones they worry in their wolf-teeth. O, wind blows
and sea crouches on sand, fawning and mouthing;
drops there and snatches again, drops again and snatches
its broken toys, its whitened pebbles and shells.

Reference:
Judith Wright [1971]: Collected Poems. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson. Page 21. From The Moving Image, published 1946.

One of my favourite poems, by Irish comic novelist and journalist Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan aka Myles na gCopaleen) (1911-1966):

The Workman’s Friend
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night –
A pint of plain is your only man.
When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A pint of plain is your only man.
When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.
When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare –
A pint of plain is your only man.
In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A pint of plain is your only man.

Today a poem by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), a schoolmate and life-long friend of Emily Dickinson. In 1881, after moving west, she wrote an account of the US mistreatment of American Indians, “A Century of Dishonour”.  On learning of her death, Emily Dickinson said: “Dear friend, can you walk, were the last words that I wrote her.  Dear friend, I can fly – her immortal reply.” Today, Cheyenne Mountain hosts the underground operations center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

Cheyenne Mountain
By easy slope to west as if it had
No thought, when first its soaring was begun,
Except to look devoutly to the sun,
It rises, and has risen, until, glad,
With light as with a garment, it is clad,
Each dawn, before the tardy plains have won
One ray; and after day has long been done
For us, the light doth cling reluctant, sad
To leave its brow.
Beloved mountain, I
Thy worshipper, as thou the sun’s, each morn,
My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee;
And think, as thy rose-tinted peaks I see,
That thou wert great when Homer was not born,
And ere thou change all human song shall die!

 
Previous poems are here.