In Reverse
p. 43 · Read in the full issue
(To my children, from behind the barbed wire of a Japanese internment camp.)
Do you remember how with happy cries You gazed upon the monkeys in the zoo, While they stared back with black and beady eyes?
I wonder what they thought of me and you!
Did those eyes burn with sullen, simian hate For our smooth, pink, complacent human faces?
Did those shrill cries denounce the fickle fate That fixed for us and them our several
places?
I think I understand, for now ’tis I Who pass monotonous davs within a cage, Staring beyond with 'sad and yearning eye, And stifling in my heart a smouldering rage.
And how I loathe the sly and simian sneer Of these damned apes who are my captors here!
Kelvin Dale in the ABC Weekly (Journal of the Australian Broadcasting Commission).