Robert Adamson - Canticle for the Bicentennial Dead lyrics

They are talking, in their cedar-benched rooms on French-polished chairs, and they talk in reasonable tones, in the great stone buildings they are talking firmly, in the half-light and they mention at times the drinking of alcohol, the sweet blood-coloured wine the young drink, the beer they share in the riverless river-beds and the backstreets, and in the main street – in government-coloured parks, drinking the sweet blood in recreation patches, campsites. They talk, the clean-handed ones, as they gather strange facts; and as they talk collecting words, they sweat under nylon wigs. Men in blue uniforms are finding bodies, the uniforms are finding the dead: young hunters who have lost their hunting, singers who would sing of fish are now found hung – crumpled in night-rags in the public's corners; discovered there broken, lit by stripes of regulated sunlight beneath the whispering rolling cell window bars. Their bodies found in postures of human-shaped effigies, hunched in the dank sour urinated atmosphere near the bed-board, beside cracked lavatory bowls, slumped on the thousand grooved, fingernailed walls of your local Police Station's cell – bodies of the street's larrikin koories suspended above concrete in the phenyl-thick air. Meanwhile outside, the count continues: on radio, on TV, the news – like Vietnam again, the faces of mothers torn across the screens – and the poets write no elegies, our artists cannot describe their grief, though the clean-handed ones paginate dossiers and court-reporters' hands move over the papers.