| "The Witnesses" | |
|---|---|
| by Dorothy Hewett | |
| Written | 1968 |
| First published in | Meanjin Quarterly vol. 27 no. 4 Summer 1968 |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Series | Ah Those Dead Ladies |
"The Witnesses" (1968) is a poem by Australian poet Dorothy Hewett. [1]
It was originally published in the journal Meanjin Quarterly vol. 27 no. 4 Summer 1968, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies. [1]
The poem forms a part of the poet's Ah Those Dead Ladies sequence, which was all brought together in her collection Rapunzel in Suburbia in 1975. [2]
A hawk soars in the clear sky searching for mice and plovers. While the hawk witnesses the world from up high, a young girl has been gang-raped by a number of boys in a haystack, "And the hawk in high sky hung."
While reviewing Wheatlands, the collection of poems Hewett published in collaboration with John Kinsella in 2000, Christopher Bantick noted that the works in the collection "shift from the lyricism of rurally inspired poetry to introspective self-examination born of landscape." He quoted from this poem to illustrate this point. [3]
At the time of the poet's death in 2002 Fay Zwicky wrote a tribute to her in which she stated: "Like your beloved Blake, you found your world in a grain of sand, the sandy soil and windswept dry soaks of the Western Australian wheat belt", listing this poem as an example. [4]
In his commentary on the poem in 60 Classic Australian Poems Geoff Page noted "The adventurous rhetoric and the poem's insistent rhymes tend to remind us of Dylan Thomas." Page concluded that "it is in a poem like 'The Witnesses' that we come closest to the essense of [Hewett's] worldview." [5]
After the poem's initial publication Meanjin Quarterly in 1968 [1] it was reprinted as follows: