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Archive photograph of an Australian milk truck
‘The milk lorry is a polished submarine’. Photograph: National Museum of Australia
‘The milk lorry is a polished submarine’. Photograph: National Museum of Australia

The Saturday poem: The Milk Lorry

This article is more than 7 years old

by Les Murray

Now the milk lorry is a polished submarine
that rolls up at midday, attaches a trunk and inhales
the dairy’s tank to a frosty snore in minutes

but its forerunner was the high-tyred barn of crisp mornings,
reeking Diesel and mammary, hazy in its roped interior
as a carpet under beaters, as it crashed along potholed lanes

cooeeing at schoolgirls. Long planks like unshipped oars
butted, levelling in there, because between each farm’s
stranded wharf of milk cans, the work was feverish slotting

of floors above floors, for load. It was sling out the bashed
paint-collared empties and waltz in the full,
stumbling on their rims under ribaldry, tilting their big gallons

then the schoolboy’s calisthenic, hoisting steel men man-high
till the glancing hold was a magazine of casque armour,
a tinplate ’tween-decks, a seminar engrossed

in one swaying tradition, behind the speeding doorways
that tempted a truant to brace and drop, short of town,
and spend the day, with book or not, down under

the bridge of a river that by dinnertime would be
tongueing like cattledogs, or down a moth-dusty reach
where the fish-feeding milk boat and cedar barge once floated.

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