Kindness in the time of COVID

One thing that has not changed in this time of COVID‐19 is the need to be kind to one another. Judith Beveridge’s poem, ‘Rory’, sends a timeless reminder of the need for tolerance, understanding and humour. I always smile when I read ‘Rory’ and wish I had known him, his farm and his family.

Rory ¹

We’d often see Rory outside the shed trying
to classify clouds coming in on the evening wind –
clouds he thought were the farm’s clip
of fine‐grained wool. On clear blue days
he’d strike match after match and try to class
the smoke. My aunt would say, ‘There’s Rory
again, tricking ghosts’. She’d told me years ago
anthrax had turned his arms and legs black
as land scorched with fire – woolsorter’s disease
they called it then.
These days he’ll look up,
sigh, walk as if he’s carrying a bale’s weight
of wool towards a skirting table, his fingers
feeling the air as if he were assessing the wool fat,
the tightness of the crimp, inspecting it
for burr and frib. The shearers tease him,
say his mind’s turned soft as felt. Some days
when the sky is full of wispy cirrus, Rory
will say that some new shedhand has forgotten
to sweep away the britch wool from the shearing.
Sometimes you can hear him auctioning
off his bales, his prices unyielding,
his tone as twangy as a ring of blowflies.
Winter mornings he’s out with his arms raised
into a dense batting of fog. On summer days
he’ll be reaching towards a haze, even bushfire smoke,
or looking into the distance for stray clouds,
ready to coax them in like orphaned lambs.
Once one of the shearers stuck a mess of dags
and cotted wool to Rory’s head, then took to him
with rusty shears to do some wigging.
My uncle punched the man so hard he reeled
round the yard like a wether with the ryegrass staggers.
Sometimes – when we catch Rory looking up
at a line of cumulus coming in – we smile
and say, ‘There’s Rory wool‐gathering again’.

Judith Beveridge is the author of 7 volumes of poetry and is a former lecturer in poetry at the University of Sydney. I had the privilege of being her student and learnt as much about the art of teaching as I did about poetry. Judith, who ‘suffered from an intense and debilitating shyness’ from childhood, knows about solitude, isolation and how it feels to be different. In the Author’s Note in ‘Sun Music’ she writes, ‘Apart from my family, and later close friends, I found it extremely uncomfortable to have to engage in conversations with people. It even caused me enormous anxiety to go to the corner shop and ask for an ice cream or bag of lollies. My first friend at school was overjoyed when, after many months, I finally said ‘hello’ to her in the playground. She was so happy that I’d spoken she took me to her home to tell her mother. … Because of this shyness, I preferred to spend time on my own, which meant I relied on books and my imagination for company’.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Susan Ogle is an editorial board member of the Australasian Journal on Ageing.

Biography

Susan Ogle is a geriatrician at Royal North Shore Hospital. Her poetry has been published in literary and medical journals. She is co‐editor of Falling and Flying. Poems on Ageing. Judith Beveridge and Susan Ogle. Sydney, Australia: Brandl and Schlesinger; 2015.