Serendipity in finding a poet I love
About twenty years ago I was browsing a warehouse store loaded with doo-dads and junk when I came upon a bin of books. I wasn’t looking for books. In fact I wasn’t looking for anything in particular – maybe a trinket for the cat or some weird gadget that had sounded good to an investor but had failed miserably in the consumer market. Sometimes weirdo stuff can be fun. The books looked quirky, too, odd items that were printed and left to fade in a sunlit store. Now they needed a home.
I was surprised to see a book of poetry lying in the pile. It was written by a poet that, at the time, I’d never heard of – Les Murray. I turned the book over and saw Murray was Australian – the book had made its way around half the globe to fall into my hands. The pages opened serendipitously, too, on a poem called “The Burning Truck.” I began reading casually with the prejudice that this was a Hallmark edition with cute kangaroos and koala bears. But by the first stanza I was caught up in the energy of the poem (see below). The fighter planes zip in over the sandbar “one and one and one” with the fury of a sharply edited war film, and the juxtaposition of the planes and the kitchen crockery tips the reader off that this is not the usual military target.
But the first stanza is a place setter; the second brings in the real subject, the truck that takes sudden fire and, like the planes, is “coming and coming” to further terrorize the population. The “we” of the poem depend on logic – it will be halted some way, such as it will “fetch up against a building.” But it rolls on. The “we” pray to be set free of this horror, but then something strange occurs. “The wild boys of the street” go running after it. And it continues
past the church, on past
the last lit windows, and then out of the world
with its disciples.
Well, of course, I bought the book and have been a devotee of Les Murray ever since.
Some people have seen this as an anti-war poem, and see the wild boys of the street as fools who dote on violence. I’m not sure I agree. My mind goes toward those wild boys who follow the truck “out of the world” and not with the villagers who stay behind, terrified behind their windows and praying to be “set free.” But these boys are genuinely free. And terrifying. They go beyond the churches and the civilized lit windows in “gorillas of flame,” sweeping out of this world into the dark beyond. I hesitate to say they are messengers of war, but if the world is a constant flux of creation and destruction, perhaps they are the colossal energy that powers the flux.
This is a narrative poem that works completely on symbolism – a form of writing that is not in favor these days. And yet I find it one of my favorite poems of the late 20th Century. I love that I can’t completely tie it down.
I hope you enjoy it, too.
The Burning Truck
for Mrs. Margaret Welton
It began at dawn with fighter planes:
they came in off the sea and didn’t rise,
they leaped the sandbar one and one and one
coming so fast the crockery they shook down
off my kitchen shelves was spinning in the air
when they were gone.
They came in off the sea and drew a wave
of lagging cannon-shells across our roofs.
Windows spat glass, a truck took sudden fire,
out leaped the driver, but the truck ran on,
growing enormous, shambling by our street-doors,
coming and coming…
By every right in town, by every average
we knew of in the world, it had to stop,
fetch up against a building, fall to rubble
from pure force of burning, for its whole
body and substance were consumed with heat
but it would not stop.
And all of us who knew our place and prayers
clutched our verandah-rails and window-sills,
begging that truck between our teeth to halt,
keep going, vanish, strike . . . but set us free.
And then we saw the wild boys of the street
go running after it.
And as they followed, cheering, on it crept,
windshield melting now, canopy-frame a cage
torn by gorillas of flame, and it kept on
over the tramlines, past the church, on past
the last lit windows, and then out of the world
with its disciples.
Les Murray
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