My wife came out on the Goya
in the mid-year of our century.
In the fogs of that winter
many hundred ships were sounding;
the DP camps were being washed to sea.
The bombsites and the ghettoes
were edging out to Israel,
to Brazil, to Africa, America.
The separating ships were bound away
to the cities of refuge
built for the age of progress.
Hull-down and pouring light
the tithe-barns, the cathedrals
were bearing the old castes away.
Pattern-bombed out of babyhood,
Hungarians-become-Swiss,
the children heard their parents:
Argentina? Or Australia?
Less politics, in Australia …
Dark Germany, iron frost
and the waiting many weeks
then a small converted warship
under the moon, turning south.
Way beyond the first star
and beyond Cape Finisterre
the fishes and the birds
did eat of their heave-offerings.
The Goya was a barracks:
mess-queue, spotlights, tower,
crossing the Middle Sea.
In the haunted blue light
that burned nightlong in the sleeping-decks
the tiered bunks were restless
with coughing, demons, territory.
On the Sea of Sweat, the Red Sea,
the flat heat melted even
dulled deference of the injured.
Nordics and Slavonics
paid salt-tax day and night, being
absolved of Europe
but by the Gate of Tears
the barrack was a village
with accordions and dancing
(Fräulein, kennen Sie meinen Rhythmus?)
approaching the southern stars.
Those who said Europe
has fallen to the Proles
and the many who said
we are going for the children,
the nouveau poor
and the cheerful shirtsleeve Proles,
the children, who thought
No Smoking signs meant men
mustn’t dress for dinner,
those who had hopes
and those who knew that they
were giving up their lives
were becoming the people
who would say, and sometimes urge,
in the English-speaking years:
We came out on the Goya.
At last, a low coastline,
old horror of Dutch sail-captains.
Behind it, still unknown,
sunburnt farms, strange trees, family jokes
and all the classes of equality.
As it fell away northwards
there was one last week for songs,
for dreaming at the rail,
for beloved meaningless words.
Standing in to Port Phillip
in the salt-grey summer light
the village dissolved
into strained shapes holding luggage;
now they, like the dour
Australians below them, were facing
encounter with the Foreign
where all subtlety fails.
Those who, with effort,
with concealment, with silence, had resisted
the collapsed star Death,
who had clawed their families from it,
those crippled by that gravity
were suddenly, shockingly
being loaded aboard lorries:
They say, another camp—
One did not come for this—
As all the refitted
ships stood, oiling, in the Bay,
spectres, furious and feeble,
accompanied the trucks through Melbourne,
resignation, understandings
that cheerful speed dispelled at length.
That first day, rolling north
across the bright savanna,
not yet people, but numbers.
Population. Forebears.
Bonegilla, Nelson Bay,
the dry land barbed-wire ships
from which some would never land.
In these, as their parents
learned the Fresh Start music:
physicians nailing crates,
attorneys cleaning trams,
the children had one last
ambiguous summer holiday.
Ahead of them lay
the Deep End of the schoolyard,
tribal testing, tribal soft-drinks,
and learning English fast,
the Wang-Wang language.
Ahead of them, refinements:
thumbs hooked down hard under belts
to repress gesticulation;
ahead of them, epithets:
wog, reffo, Commo Nazi,
things which can be forgotten
but must first be told.
And farther ahead
in the years of the Coffee Revolution
and the Smallgoods Renaissance,
the early funerals:
the misemployed, the unadaptable,
those marked by the Abyss,
friends who came on the Goya
in the mid-year of our century.