Bruce Dawe - Life Cycle lyrics

When children are born in Victoria they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots, having already begun a lifetime's barracking. Carn, they cry, Carn … feebly at first while parents playfully tussle with them for possession of a rusk: Ah, he's a little Tiger! (And they are …) Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming towards the daylight's roaring empyrean Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture, they break surface and are forever lost, their minds rippling out like streamers In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice like the voice of God booms from the stands Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed. Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat, they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven, And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team's fortunes – the reckless proposal after the one-point win, the wedding and honeymoon after the grand final … They will not grow old as those from the more northern states grow old, for them it will always be three-quarter time with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term, That pa**ion persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons, enabling old-timers by boundary fences to dream of resurgent lions and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present, So that mythology may be perpetually renewed and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing But the dance forever the same – the elderly still loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end, having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation