PHILLIP COMMENDS JAMES BLOODWORTH
Not a man of straw, Phillip surmises, This sevener, a servant of the crown, A First Fleeter that renders pardon’s prize, But a veritable brick, I’ll be bound, To set his course on sound foundation And found this town on divers enterprises: Cots, storehouses, huts hip-roofed, barracks, Rising to abodes of stone and blocks of brick, Two floors, glass windows, a Georgian pediment No less, at King’s Wharf, so elegantly eminent – Our Government House, a magnificent edifice!
Iron gaiters he’d worn on the Charlotte, no choker, On account of the books he’d supposedly cooked. Ho-hum, a felon’s light fingers but a master’s thumb.
Presently he’s straight as a cabbage-tree palm That bowers our bourn we name Tank Stream, Renders rush cutters’ thatch and timber frame, His gang of pressed pugs trampling loam.
For toffish officers scorn to cake their cuffs In that mucky red stuff to mould and bake. Mere wenches’ work, these brickbats scoff, or crimps’. In Brickfield’s kilns, mud-mortar turns to slime.
God’s bones! Soul of the flesh is in the blood. His craft, his art, worth much more than mud. Michael Small
March 9-April 9, 2014