Quaint

Quaint as we all are in our acquaintance

with our mode of life, being all we know -

pride learning what to hide and who to show,

our largesse and the limits of our patience -

how we smile at the quirks of Europeans,

Asian quantities and all their projections,

the world in general, its favourite predilections

regal hand-me-downs and charms of plebeians.

Still, we maintain the boundaries of our youth

like those before us (quite!) just getting by,

years turning customs into a stranger truth:

the stupidity of sinners and the lot of saints

quiet cause for reflection, not simply a sigh

as we hand on our own special version of Quaint.

 

 Image: The Heidelberg Bowling Club and yonder from Conder Ward windows of Warringal Private Hospital, October 2026.

Length

 Sentence in italics: Virginia Woolf, ‘Orlando’, page 275  

 

The true length of a person’s life, whatever

the stretching minutes, the landmark days

the hearsay of the workday week

the limited counting of due seasons, whatever

the Dictionary of National Biography may say

its anecdotes ballooning out of shape

its genealogies taking up space

when or if it mentions one at all

is always a matter of dispute

while speaking words that predate English

hearing songs only birds can make

seeing in one glance millennia nightly

sensing another as here now and for always

praying where peace passes all understanding.

Usage

 

As Inglese burgeons into insurmountable clouds

of cut and paste and blah and slop accumulated -

wordiness without genesis or revelation,

separated from the tongues that made words live -

English yet continues its normal pick and choose

in the regular plays of everyday use and notice.

Swish and lush and blunt its ways, Always Immediate,

needful and inventive and Apposite Instantly

the language of tireless folk like you and I

wanting the right verb, as we step from here to there

serving up the complementary pun or compliment,

self-possessed with our own meanings, Ageless Idioms,

private and peculiar, public and purposeful

as words will do, as only certain words will do.