LES MURRAY - reads John Whitworth's 'Sylvia's Verse'

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• published: 08 Aug 2014
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Recorded on the wing from the audience at a reading at the Mildura's Writer's Festival. All the more remarkable for the fact that Ted Hughes was the poet who recommended Les Murray for the 'Queen's Medal for Poetry'. Sylvia’s Verse She never should have married him, she never should have wed. She should’ve stayed a single girl and kept her single bed. For pity’s sake, her big mistake was saying yes to Ted. He was hairy, he was handsome, he had dreamy bedroom eyes. Let me feel your pain and take the strain. I deeply sympathise He could knock them down like ninepins, it was really no surprise. A handsome man with bedroom eyes, a poet and a scholar. A diamond geezer, made to please, a hundred cents a dollar, An English gent and Heaven sent to rescue girls from squalor. And yet, do not forget, too many poets in a house is Just an overplus of verse that leads to quarrels and to grouses. Yes, the bard life is a hard life, that’s unless you wear the trousers . Oh, she should’ve been a saga not a single, sad novella, For she wasn’t patient Grizel and she wasn’t Cinderella And she should have done a runner with another sort of feller, Say a fancy sort of feller with a fashion in frivolity, A jokey sort of bloke who spun a line in jazz and jollity, A Yankee Doodle dandy with a Technicolor quality. But eerie, dark and dreary, Ted was lacking in romance, Just a sombre sort of hombre who had never learned to dance. Yup! she should’ve upped and buggered off the time she had the chance. ~ John Whitworth ~