UN-A-BRIDGED
© Will Moody, 2013
Winner, 2013 CJ Dennis Poetry Competition – Themed Section, Toolangi, Victoria.
So, once more, a fresh election
– it’s two thousand and thirteen –
and on view for our inspection
there on every TV screen,
politicians spieling promises designed to win our votes,
but they’re all a bunch of double-dealing, two-faced billygoats.
Yes, they’ll promise this, they’ll promise
that with hand upon their heart;
they’ll assure the Doubting Thomas
“Count on me to do my part!
If you’ll only give me your support I promise, ridgey-didge,
at the top of my agenda will be Wombat Creek’s new bridge!”
Here in Wombat, though, we’ve heard it
all a hundred times before.
Each election they’ve inferred it
won’t get pigeon-holed no more.
Yet our crick is just as bridge-less as in pioneering days,
because “Dawkingses” and “Joneses” never change their shiftless ways.
For each claims once he’s in office:
“Due to budgetary strain,
there’s no money in the coffers.”
So we get fobbed off again.
Though each vows that he’s in favour of the bridge on Wombat’s crick,
all these hundred years we’ve yet to see one solitary brick.
When we’ll get a bridge at Wombat
only Nostradamus knows,
but we carry on the combat
where the Muddy River flows
with the “Dawkingses” and “Joneses” every chance we get to vote,
but we have to cross our crick, meanwhile, in Bill McClosky’s boat.
You might say we’re “swinging voters”
…you may call us what you will…
but since days of straw-hat boaters
we’ve been looking for some dill
who might, by some stroke of fortune, make one small slip of the pen
when he makes it into office…we might get our bridge built then.
Yes, they say “Hope springs eternal”.
You might say that’s Wombat’s creed,
because politics’ infernal,
cold, indifference to our need
means that Wombat’s crick’s as bridge-less as when C.J. penned his rhyme
way back then, in nineteen thirteen…mate…that is a long, long time!
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