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Kenneth Slessor - The Atlas
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I. The King of Cuckooz
 THE King of Cuckooz Contrey 
 Hangs peaked above Argier 
 With Janzaries and Marabutts 
 To bid a sailor fear— 
 With lantern-eyed astrologers 
 Who walk upon the walls 
 And ram with stars their basilisks 
 Instead of cannon-balls. 
 And in that floating castle 
 (I tell you it is so) 
 Five thousand naked Concubines 
 With dulcimers do go. 
 Each rosy nose anoints a tile, 
 Bang, bang! the fort salutes, 
 When He, the King of Cuckooz Land, 
 Comes forth in satin boots, 
 Each rosy darling flies before 
 When he desires his tent, 
 Or, like a tempest driving flowers, 
 Inspects a battlement. 
 And this I spied by moonlight 
 Behind a royal bamboo— 
 That Monarch in a curricle 
 Which ninety virgins drew; 
 That Monarch drinking nectar 
 (Lord God, my tale attest!) 
 Milked from a snow-white elephant 
 As white as your white breast! 
 And this is no vain fable 
 As other knaves may lie— 
 Have I not got that Fowl aboard 
 Which no man may deny? 
 The King`s own hunting-falcon 
 I limed across the side 
 When by the Bayes of Africa 
 King James`s Fleet did ride. 
 What crest is there emblazoned, 
 Whose mark is this, I beg, 
 Stamped on the silver manacle 
 Around that dainty leg? 
 Let this be news to you, my dear, 
 How Man should be revered; 
 Though I`m no King of Cuckooz Land, 
 Behold as fierce a beard! 
 I have as huge an appetite, 
 As deep a kiss, my girl, 
 And somewhere, for the hand that seeks, 
 Perhaps a Sultan`s pearl! 

. Post-Roads
 POST-ROADS that clapped with tympan heels 
 Of tilburies and whiskys rapidly spanking, 
 Where`s now the tireless ghost of Ogilby? 
 Post-roads 
 That buoyed the rich and plunging springs 
 Of coaches vaster than Escurials, 
 Where now does Ogilby propel that Wheel, 
 What milestones does he pause to reprimand, 
 In what unmapped savanna of dumb shades? 
 Ye know not—ye are silent—brutish ducts 
 Numbed by the bastinadoes of iron boots, 
 Three hundred years asnore. Do you forget 
 The phaetons and fiacres, flys and breaks, 
 The world of dead men staring out of glass 
 That drummed upon your bones? Do you forget 
 Those nostrils oozing smoke, those floating tails, 
 Those criniers whipped with air? 
 And kidnapped lights, 
 Floats of rubbed yellow towed from window-panes, 
 Rushing their lozenges through headlong stones; 
 And smells of hackneys, mohair sour with damp, 
 Leather and slopped madeira, partridge-pies 
 Long-buried under floors; and yawning Fares 
 With bumping flap-dark spatulas of cards— 
 "Knave takes the ten . . . oh, God, I wish that it, 
 I wish that it was Guildford" . . . .
 Ogilby 
 Did not forget, could not escape such ecstacies, 
 Even in the monasteries of mensuration, 
 Could not forget the roads that he had gone 
 In fog and shining air. Each line was joy, 
 Each computation a beatitude, 
 A diagram of Ogilby`s eye and ear 
 With soundings for the nose. Wherefore I think, 
 Wherefore I think some English gentleman, 
 Some learned doctor of the steak-houses, 
 Ending late dinner, having strolled outside 
 To quell the frivolous hawthorn, may behold 
 There in the moonshine, rolling up an hill, 
 Steered by no fleshly hand, with spokes of light, 
 The Wheel—John Ogilby`s Wheel—the WHEEL hiss by, 
 Measuring mileposts of eternity. 

. Dutch Seacoast
 No wind of Life may strike within 
 This little country`s crystal bin, 
 Nor calendar compute the days 
 Tubed in their capsule of soft glaze. 
 Naked and rinsed, the bubble-clear 
 Canals of Amsterdam appear, 
 The blue-tiled turrets, china clocks 
 And glittering beaks of weathercocks. 
 A gulf of sweet and winking hoops 
 Whereon there ride  poops 
 With flying mouths and fleeting hair 
 Of saints hung up like candles there— 
 Fox-coloured mansions, lean and tall, 
 That burst in air but never fall 
 Whose bolted shadows, row by row, 
 Float changeless on the stones below— 
 Sky full of ships, bay full of town, 
 A port of waters jellied brown: 
 Such is the world no tide may stir, 
 Sealed by the great cartographer. 
 O, could he but clap up like this 
 My decomposed metropolis, 
 Those other countries of the mind, 
 So tousled, dark and undefined! 

. Mermaids
 ONCE Mermaids mocked your ships 
 With wet and scarlet lips 
 And fish-dark difficult hips, Conquistador; 
 Then Ondines danced with Sirens on the shore, 
 Then from his cloudy stall, you heard the Kraken call, 
 And, mad with twisting flame, the Firedrake roar. 
 Such old-established Ladies 
 No mariner eyed askance, 
 But, coming on deck, would swivel his neck 
 To watch the darlings dance, 
 Or in the gulping dark of nights 
 Would cast his tranquil eyes 
 On singular kinds of Hermaphrodites 
 Without the least surprise. 
 Then portulano maps were scrolled 
 With compass-roses, green and gold, 
 That fired the stiff old Needle with their dyes 
 And wagged their petals over parchment skies. 
 Then seas were full of Dolphins` fins, 
 Full of swept bones and flying Jinns, 
 Beaches were filled with Anthropophagi 
 And Antient Africa with Palanquins. 
 Then sailors, with a flaked and rice-pale flesh 
 Staring from maps in sweet and poisoned places, 
 Diced the old Skeleton afresh 
 In brigs no bigger than their moon-bunched faces. 
 Those well-known and respected Harpies 
 Dance no more on the shore to and fro; 
 All that has ended long ago; 
 Nor do they sing outside the captain`s porthole, 
 A proceeding fiercely reprehended 
 By the governors of the P. & O. 
 Nor do they tumble in the sponges of the moon 
 For the benefit of tourists in the First Saloon, 
 Nor fork their foaming lily-fins below the side 
 On the ranges of the ale-clear tide. 
 And scientists now, with binocular-eyes, 
 Remark in a tone of complacent surprise: 
 "Those pisciform mammals—pure Spectres, I fear— 
 Must be Doctor Gerbrandus`s Mermaids, my dear!" 
 But before they can cause the philosopher trouble, 
 They are GONE like the cracking of a bubble. 

. The Seafight
 HERE in a gulf of golden leaf 
 You`ll find a seafight ringed with flame; 
 Cannons that cry Tirduf, Tirduf, 
 Daggers that collop, guns that maim; 
 Jaws beaked with blood, men flung to hell, 
 Men blasting trumpets, men that flee, 
 Men crimped by death, and under all 
 Old patient, baleful, spying Sea— 
 Old Sea, that in a dicebox rolls 
 Their trundling skulls, their jacks of bone, 
 That sucks them out of broken hulls 
 When other mumbling mouths have gone— 
 Old hungry Sea, that holds our flesh 
 In the huge forceps of the storm, 
 And they are given to the fish 
 And we plucked forth, and we made warm. 
 But ye that kill, why heed the face 
 Of Ocean? Not alone you slay, 
 Since deeper seas are dammed in space 
 And fiercer storms can scream in clay; 
 Existence has as bitter teeth, 
 But we can always find a minute 
 For the festivities of death 
 Who sail upon this dangerous planet.
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