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Flared Pants, Mini Skirts and Mr Eliot
How like Eliot it is in tone.
Even the landscape has the grime
of London in each line. I must have been
no more than nineteen when I wrote
the poem caught in the spell of his hypnotic
rhythm and rhymes.
The bright, clean air of my home
was seen through the filter
of a foreign fog, his soulful exhaustion
washed a gray tide across my youth.
He stood as a monument in whose shadow
nothing could grow.
Prufrock haunted the back alleys
of my mind, a rebel almost in the guise
of a comic. He was hardly me
in a world of pub rock and cold beers
on lazy, sun drenched Aussie afternoons -
no rolled up trousers but instead,
reefers, flared pants and mini skirts
and a future balanced on the whim
of a conscription ballot
hanging over my head.
Copyright ©
Paul Willason
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