The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry

Home > Other > The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry > Page 14
The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry Page 14

by John Kinsella

Forgiven.

  After forgiveness,

  Silence.

  Picnic

  On a green sweep of Kings Park grass

  dappled with late summer shadow

  I joined a picnic with Afghani refugees,

  sat sedately with the women

  demure but spritely in their hijabs,

  kids darting, tossing balls,

  larking around, politely into food.

  Meat balls, hummus and tabouli

  mingled with our sizzled sausages

  on paper plates. Coke and juice.

  Someone had found work.

  Someone had been accepted as

  a lab technician. Someone’s husband

  still in detention three years on.

  Did she get to see him?

  No, couldn’t get time off,

  after school the kids alone

  and so on.

  Under a far-off tree their fathers,

  uncles, brothers brooded, a still

  silent circle squinting into sunlight

  smoking, looking straight ahead.

  Nobody seemed to be thinking of

  a better world, nobody was asking

  for more than a place to sit quietly

  and wait. What weighs the heart must

  sit it out till nightfall for release

  once everyone’s asleep.

  And even then …

  Watching all this, in and out of it,

  remembering my own young wifehood

  as a stranger, my first child born

  in an alien tongue, the grey apartment block,

  the cold, the speechless folk who passed

  without a nod or smile, the men who carried

  boxed piled with lurid neckties

  from the Krawattenfabrik upstairs.

  A condemned building.

  Where would we all end up?

  The tenants roused the concierge: the baby cries

  all night, that pram is blocking the foyer.

  Tell the foreigner.

  I took it six flights up

  and six flights down on sunny days.

  Wasps clustered over cherry jam,

  the tiny kitchen, scrubbed washboard.

  Hovering useless over the baby’s wheezy breath,

  I rarely ventured out, avoided peak hours

  in the cellar armed with shameful nappies,

  took my turn with dread before

  the commune’s idol: a glossy water-driven

  centrifuge. Its thick black snout

  writhed serpentine around the tub,

  soap-scummed water spewing forth

  from flood-tide whine to whizz

  to final cataract. Mesmerised, I bowed.

  ‘Anyone can marry and have children,’

  said my mother far away in cloud-cuckoo

  land of Oz, savage with disappointment

  for her accomplished daughter, all

  the dead scherzos and maimed fugues.

  My mother-in-law noted dust balls

  gathering under the bed, the wilting

  red geraniums in their box,

  the cobwebbed pane.

  I didn’t join the turbaned band

  of broad-arsed women lugging rugs

  each day to the courtyard rack,

  beating out the grey frustration of

  their lives with rattan canes.

  ‘She ought to be ashamed of all that dust.’

  My mother-in-law’s precise Hochdeutsch.

  You’d think my husband’s life with me

  grievous enough without her fretful chorus.

  Months like this as Zürich wives and

  spinsters, buttoned to the neck in black,

  twitched yellowing curtains, pursed their lips,

  beat their fraying carpets in the yard:

  tumbled boxes of neckties passing up and down

  under their wordless bearers,

  wasps landing, taking off.

  And I, both in and out of it,

  learning how to live a life,

  sit quiet in a cold place

  waiting to touch the sun-warmed earth.

  William Grono (b.1934)

  Separation

  Today we decide to tell the children.

  We find them watching two toy-like

  spacemen cumbersomely perform a task

  on TV’s version of the moon.

  They absorb the news, are quiet, watchful.

  Surrounded by their costly litter,

  the astronauts salute their flag

  standing stiffly in the lack of air.

  Peter Jeffery (b.1935)

  Pompeii in Australia

  While bodies turn brown and drown in oil

  The beach blocks burn in the sun,

  Pompeii by the Australian sea.

  Sand drifts in lava folds across the bulldozed scrub,

  And motorboats make frivolous surf upon the sea.

  Low trees with leather leaves

  Hover about the stone barbecue,

  To watch the cinders of black flies

  Drift down to half cooked meat,

  Away to a half filled glass of marsala,

  Across to a drunken sleeping hammocked man.

  Over and up in an ecstasy of riches

  Vomited up thicker than Christmas pudding.

  Art does not redeem Eros here,

  Enmeshed limbs lie not on perspiring walls

  But on casual beds in dissarray.

  Only the cats stalk the grass with grace,

  While their owners snore grosser than flies.

  Randolph Stow (b.1935 d.2010)

  The Land’s Meaning

  For Sidney Nolan

  The love of man is a weed of the waste places.

  One may think of it as the spinifex of dry souls.

  I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country

  where it is said to grow; but signs come back,

  reports come back, of continuing exploration

  in that terrain. And certain of our young men,

  who turned in despair from the bar, upsetting a glass,

  and swore: ‘No more’ (for the tin rooms stank of flyspray)

  are sending word that the mastery of silence

  alone is empire. What is God, they say,

  but a man unwounded in his loneliness?

  And the question (applauded, decided) falls like dust

  on veranda and bar; and in pauses, when thinking ceases,

  the footprints of the recently departed

  march to the mind’s horizons, and endure.

  And often enough as we turn again, and laugh,

  cloud, hide away the tracks with an acid word,

  there is one or more gone past the door to stand

  (wondering, debating) in the iron street,

  and toss a coin, and pass, to the township’s end,

  where one-eyed ’Mat, eternal dealer in camels,

  grins in his dusty yard like split fruit.

  But one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps

  of landscapes still unmapped, gives this account:

  ‘The third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air.

  Then the crows turned back, the camels knelt down and

  stayed there,

  and a skin-coloured surf of sandhills jumped the horizon

  and swamped me. I was bushed for forty years.

  ‘And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree.

  And I said to him: “Mate — I don’t need to know your name —

  Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes down.”’

  Merry-go-round

  This is the playground circumnavigation:

  The leap in space and safe return to land,

  Past sea and hills, boats, trees, familiar buildings,

  Back to the port of one assisting hand.

  Adventurers learn here, but do not venture

  Yet from their c
ircular continuous sweep

  From start to start. Where going is homing-turning

  Nothing is lost, what’s won is all to keep.

  The gulls stoop down, the big toy jerks and flies;

  And time is tethered where its centre lies.

  Penelope

  Exhausted summer. New sails in the roadsteads are

  the flags of homelessness: like you, a hearth.

  Like you, I say. In the cool great rooms where dawn

  unclouds as from a metal cup just emptied

  and in the warm peach-coloured rooms by lamplight

  I say: ‘Like you. Thus — thus — she was like you.’

  Where have been all my sailings, all my islands,

  but here, by you, in search of you, my island,

  whose pools, palms, dunes I feigned to find in others,

  not doubting those dissembled, I dissembled.

  Till, in dawn rooms, by evening under lamplight,

  turning, I find you: all my quest, and yet

  (changed by my searching, borrowing from those others)

  more than I left; not less than both our lives.

  Simplicities of summer fall to drift.

  Your eyes distrait. Your eyes tell me of seas,

  not without love, only, like mine, recalling

  seasons removed, an air, an immortal spring.

  The sailmakers whistle, they work at the flags of famine.

  I sail for earth’s end, where you wait, in immortal spring.

  Persephone

  Snow greys the streets that the molten pewter river

  cleaves: O love, as your cloven city cleaves you.

  Cloven, I came to your other, your winter world,

  intending harm (you had done me such springlike harm).

  Coming to force an encounter, and a crisis:

  for spring’s wound throbbed in the frost, till the blood was stirred

  against the voice that had said I must not follow

  — ‘O love, I would die — see, love, I have died for you.’

  I came with the wound of spring to the winter city

  that holds my spring in one of ten million lodgings

  to find you, free you, uproot you, most tender-rooted

  hybrid, who must half die if I have my will.

  And every street threatened irremediable meetings;

  in every train-shrill tunnel the winter faces

  promised to turn upon me your winter face,

  saying winter words. And love, I was afraid.

  Yet I would have you know I have been, and gone.

  I would have you think of me on another island

  where it is never quite spring, but an ache and waiting,

  foreshadowed nostalgia, voices once heard half-heard.

  Ruins of the City of Hay

  The wind has scattered my city to the sheep.

  Capeweed and lovely lupins choke the street

  where the wind wanders in great gaunt chimneys of hay

  and straws cry out like keyholes.

  Our yellow Petra of the fields: alas!

  I walk the ruins of forum and capital

  through quiet squares, by the temples of tranquillity.

  Wisps of the metropolis brush my hair.

  I become invisible in tears.

  This was no ratbags’ Eden: these were true haystacks.

  Golden, but functional, our mansions sprang from dreams

  of architects in love (O my meadow queen!).

  No need for fires to be lit on the yellow hearthstones;

  our walls were warmer than flesh, more sure than igloos.

  On winter nights we squatted naked as Esquimaux,

  chanting our sagas of innocent chauvinism.

  In the street no vehicle passed. No telephone,

  doorbell or till was heard in the canyons of hay.

  No stir, no sound, but the sickle and the loom,

  and the comments of emus begging by kitchen doors

  in the moonlike silence of morning.

  Though the neighbour states (said Lao Tse) lie in sight of the city

  and their cocks wake and their watchdogs warn the inhabitants

  the men of the city of hay will never go there

  all the days of their lives.

  But the wind of the world descended on lovely Petra

  and the spires of the towers and the statues and belfries fell.

  The bones of my brothers broke in the breaking columns.

  The bones of my sisters, clasping their broken children,

  cracked on the hearthstones, under the rooftrees of hay.

  I alone mourn in the temples, by broken altars

  bowered in black nightshade and mauve salvation-jane.

  And the cocks of the neighbour nations scratch in the straw.

  And their dogs rejoice in the bones of all my brethren.

  Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna

  In a sudden stillness

  the Easter lilies she gave me

  from her jungle garden

  occupy the room.

  Could she have known?

  Eyes locked on eyes

  hands locked on hands.

  So was rapt Amyclae

  undone by silence.

  Two watches whisper

  and on the table

  a little scented pollen falls.

  Glen Phillips (b.1936)

  Spring Burning

  I stood thigh deep

  in wild oats on

  a roadside verge

  of mine. This spring

  greening had plumped them.

  The full heads nodded

  heavy on emerald fibre optic shafts

  and swayed in the breath

  that shook

  the loose-leafed eucalypts.

  And yes, summer

  would come like a

  brazen border-invader

  soaring up the stalks

  with a brief

  rinse of gold

  before husks become pale flags

  fluttering

  at the edge of farms.

  Then we must think

  a falling spark

  of conflagration

  in this dry grass

  could sweep for miles.

  Better to act now!

  A spring burning

  would see us safe

  all summer long.

  But still I stood;

  whichever way

  I looked, the road

  stretched on and on.

  After all, this

  was just another

  growing oat crop.

  It’s hard to clear

  the feral off

  your property.

  Then I felt spring

  still burning

  in me.

  Fourteen Tankas for Salt-Lake Country

  I

  In this flat country

  of my birth salt lakes extend

  water’s brief service

  of slanting rainshowers: old

  maps, old continents survive

  II

  This night, waterbirds

  gabble, hoot softly across

  lake’s lap-lapping dark

  as the moon mounts my shoulder

  to show where new songs start.

  III

  Enamelled black / white

  stilts from arctic Asian tracts

  come down to strut here

  on these sleek, bleached salt-lined strands,

  in wind-shaken chill waters.

  IV

  So often lakes shape

  the outline vestiges of

  most ancient rivers.

  But these broadwater shadows

  flow only now with cloud shapes.

  V

  A lime lake’s ripple

  driven by the fresh south wind

  foams to asses’ milk

  on the far boundary shore.

  In this lapping mouth trees ache.<
br />
  VI

  Lakes reach out to the skies.

  They draw from vaulted cobalt,

  give clouded image

  back, their ruffled faces still

  these sleep-creased faithful imprints.

  VII

  Stepped out like fence-posts

  stalking pylon towers stitch

  these summer salt-lakes,

  freeze-dried by the moon’s cold shafts.

  Salt crystals speak with quiet hate.

  VIII

  This white visitor

  returns in my curtained dreams

  peering through the lace

  of branch and bole to give me,

  telegraphically, the moon.

  IX

  Children skirt lake’s edge

  their mallee sticks at the trail.

  They scribe this day’s paths

  of circumnavigation,

  prod that blind white eye of salt.

  X

  The crunch of the salt

  measures every stride we take

  on crystals yearning

  upward to avenge the plough.

  How much salt does a man need?

  XI

  At pebble height, wind

  chases and scours the brown lake’s

  tabula rasa.

  And samphire circles searching

  ways to educate this space.

  XII

  Salt lakes say to us,

  ‘The second law of thermo

  dynamics? Damn you

  for doubting with your axes,

  with your seeds sown in furrows!’

  XIII

  Death spoke to me then,

  ‘See the fence-posts there, leaning

  into the saltmarsh,

  the wires festooned with driftweed?

  This is where your fences lead.’

  XIV

  Down by the dry lakes

  the hospital crouched in dust,

  salt waited for my birth

  and the Southern Cross turned in

  a night sky of gravidence.

  Gordon Mackay-Warna (n.d.)

  Grassfire

  Tapi in Nyiyaparli

  Purungu karla kampapi warnili

  yilkarila ngalingmarra kurungkali

  wirpingka Kurtanakurtana parrkapa

  karlakungkuru jirntalara kalpampa

  piimaralu karnalpi Marngkurtu parnti pungkupungku junngarrii

  karnara yurntu manyankarra

  yilkarila ngalingmarra

  The faint glow of a burning fire

  Is stretched over a cloud in the sky —

  There is tall spinifex grass around Kurdanakurdana.

  The fire roars and sparks burst from charcoal,

 

‹ Prev