Can you get through? Unto your natural death? Can you do it? You know I once thought I was far too weak for this life. I wrote a poem about it which I have lost but which went something like:
I have thought that I were too feeble for this life;
I have thought that I lacked the courage for this.
But now from the other side,
I look down at my life playing itself out,
And I see that I had had the strength
To listen to the birds,
And to have watched the tide awhile, and
To have died.
Robin Dale
Robin Dale is a part time bohemian and poet, and a full time schizophrenic living in Ferntree Gully, Melbourne, Australia. He was born in the UK and came to Australia in 1970 at the age of 8 with family. Educated in the Western District of Victoria and at Melbourne University where he lived at Queen's College, he quit a postgraduate course in 1987 in order to write. He did odd jobs until 1990 when schizophrenia struck and he was hospitalised with psychosis. For the next thirty or so years he has suffered at the hands of a demonic power, which continues without abatement. In between hospital visits he has continued writing with much success, although he is virtually unpublished. He currently lives in an aged care facility.
