The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry

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The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry Page 19

by John Kinsella


  The consolation of a lightly rising breeze.

  My Daughter Reading

  For Chay

  My daughter reads in a white hammock,

  Suspended high in our Cape lilac.

  Its pervasive scent is a sweet mauve smoke

  Wafting across the yard to where I sit.

  It lulls my worry on a gentle thermal,

  My anxiety that she might tumble,

  Tipped from the perch of her green thoughts,

  And the day stay indifferent and lovely.

  She has chosen an old calico sheet,

  Slung herself between two sturdy forks,

  Hauling an encyclopaedia after her.

  She has constructed this place carefully,

  A paradigm of a child’s thinking:

  It is hung across a clear half-moon

  Frosting white in the afternoon.

  From there she can watch red wattlebirds

  Sip the indigo evening and goshawks,

  White as salt, hunt geckoes in the scrub,

  The sea a blue presence in her imaginings.

  (She has seen a unicorn from up there).

  Squinting at the emerging flecks of stars,

  She queries which one is a planet.

  Walking to her I call upwards, asking

  The title of the book she ponders.

  Tree of Knowledge her smile calls back.

  My unease rises with the evening wind.

  Later, she climbs down, takes me to safety,

  A risk negotiated, a lesson learnt,

  Moonlight bleaching the shifting sand we tread.

  David Brooks (b.1953)

  The Pines, Cottesloe

  Firetails

  tunnel through banksia,

  worms

  bore into bast and phloem

  or turn about the dark root

  half-blind in earthblack.

  Behind the house

  in a stand

  of tall radiata

  white cockatoos

  are ripping the tight young

  pinecones into flight.

  Beneath them

  between trunks

  already knee-deep in twilight

  a garden-spider

  is weaving a huge night star

  and I can hear

  in the long grass

  something stirring.

  Already

  in twos and threes

  the gulls are returning

  and one late crow

  labouring like a man in mid-channel.

  For a moment

  retracing the path

  I am half in love

  even with his dark wings, coal-

  black and shining.

  coming back

  again and again

  at nightfall

  to rest in the high pines.

  Philip Collier (b.1953)

  Grave Change

  In my Grandmother’s

  stories are pioneer

  parrots cursing

  fucked out harlots

  who in wide west

  streets twirl the sun

  off parasols

  into pubs of gritty miners

  surfacing

  blownout in beers

  and sagging

  desert winds.

  Death

  was the caving in

  of a widow’s eyes

  a dry dust dance

  she’ll lie soon settling in

  outback obituaries

  terse as her stories

  of heydays of death

  opening the west

  in a graveyard

  of mines.

  Goldfever’s miserable

  paydays she keeps

  spitting

  lit her Louis’ dynamite

  fag as he keeps

  going down mad

  mines of her memory.

  I’ve listened at

  the edge of deepening

  graves of greed

  disease and madness

  to her falling

  silent as talk

  of these deaths

  gets her down.

  Her parrot goes on

  about nothing

  changing: red lights

  on sagging

  blownout miners.

  Death

  finally with her

  eighty years on

  high flights of steel

  eyed magnates staking

  the sun’s heart

  as sick winds blow

  yellowcake dust

  from caravans of trucks

  out of her land

  frontiered again

  with graves.

  Philip Mead (b.1953)

  There’s Small Grass Appearing on the Hill-side

  There’s small grass appearing on the hill-side

  and many abandoned orchards in the valley

  the wake of time rolls out behind each traveller in an oily V.

  Good morning, you’re feeling full of advantages,

  at speed, our wishes populate the echoing room

  sunlight floods the market-place, for a while

  we always strive to live sometime in the near future

  where the horns rattle and the journeys are through winter —

  slow code sounds through the concourse at night

  representations are seductive, like tomorrow’s interview

  or a being from another orbit of existence, leaving us in peace.

  There’s scraps of mist in the hawthorn hedges, now that you can see

  the peninsula might be where you end up, like a jig-saw piece

  coming over the Sympathy Hills, looking down on Impression Bay.

  Robert Walker (b.1953 d.1984)

  Solitary Confinement

  (Died 4.30–5.00 a.m., Tuesday 28th August 1984 in Fremantle State Prison. Aged 25.)

  Have you ever been ordered to strip

  Before half a dozen barking eyes

  Forcing you against a wall —

  Ordering you to part your legs and bend over?

  Have you ever had a door slammed

  Locking you out of the world,

  Propelling you into timeless space —

  To the emptiness of silence?

  Have you ever laid on a wooden bed –

  In regulation pyjamas,

  And tried to get a bucket to talk —

  In all seriousness?

  Have you ever begged for blankets

  From an eye staring through a hole in the door

  Rubbing at the cold air digging into your flesh —

  Biting down on your bottom lip, while mouthing ‘Please’?

  Have you ever heard screams in the middle of the night

  Or the sobbings of a stir-crazy prisoner,

  Echo over and over again in the darkness —

  Threatening to draw you into madness?

  Have you ever rolled up into a human ball

  And prayed for sleep to come?

  Have you ever laid awake for hours

  Waiting for morning to mark another day of being alone?

  If you have never experienced even one of these,

  Then bow your head and thank God.

  For it’s a strange thing indeed.

  This rehabilitation system!

  Andrew Lansdown (b.1954)

  Between Glances

  It is a liquidambar, the tree

  I planted two months ago

  beside my study. Green and

  leafy then, it is almost bare

  now. A little twiggy thing.

  One red leaf flutters from it

  like a child’s hand. For a week

  it has been waving to me,

  wanting my attention, trying

  to tell me something unknown

  to eucalypts and evergreens.

  Something European or Japanese.

  Something sad and deciduous.

  That brave beautiful leaf,


  beckoning the eyes as a flame

  beckons the palms. All day

  it has warmed me. Exquisite,

  that small wind-chafed hand,

  its familiar flutter. I glance

  down at my work then out

  again, only to find it gone.

  Gone between glances. If only

  I had known that last wave

  was a goodbye, a farewell,

  I would not have looked away.

  Emergence

  Cicadas have left their cuticles

  clinging to the daisy stems:

  brown shells, burst at the back

  of the thorax. Emergent, one

  is exquisitely veined in aqua,

  its wings soft as membrane.

  Soon its juices will blacken

  and its wings become cellophane.

  Then it will tick, metallic

  and fast, like an engine cooling.

  Shane McCauley (b.1954)

  The Dissolution of a Fox

  For an instant the perfect grass-framed

  dead body of a fox, stretched

  but as if still running in its sleep,

  red-brown perfection of fur,

  pointed ears, mouth agape with effort.

  Then camera’s rapid fast forward

  and the eye can scarcely unsort

  pieces of this puzzle quickly enough:

  as it rushes through unravelling time

  animal becomes tufty carcass, insects

  like vast columns of removalists

  move in. Fox fades to outline, as if

  nature has insisted on taking all traces

  of its triumph and hoarding it in air.

  The Cosmonauts Smell Flowers

  Legs limp from treading so many stars

  They rest in deck chairs set for them on the steppes

  Of Central Asia; they have pressed faces

  Against the universe for 175 days,

  And now white lined hands clutch at bouquets.

  All they have seen are stars and spaces

  Between them, now their smiles are for earth alone.

  Feet are yet too light to appreciate stone,

  Heads hang forward, senses ache at the flowers.

  175 days without flowers and the world denies

  Them strength to hold its fragrance.

  With shy eagerness they accept the welcome,

  Try to forget the machine they floated in the skies.

  Here is cold wind, sunlight to shine on bayonets,

  Men heavy as history, a future frightened

  By the past. But for stilted moments these men

  From great space can feel a minute goodness:

  Noses touch petals, stars of pollen stare from the cups.

  Graeme Dixon (b.1955 d.2010)

  Prison

  Prison

  what a bitch

  Brutality

  Savageness

  Depression

  Is all caused by it

  Must’a been

  A wajella*

  Who invented this Hell

  Wouldn’t know

  For sure

  But but by the torture

  I can tell

  To deny

  A man freedom

  Is the utmost

  Form of

  Torment

  Just for

  The crime

  Of finding money

  To pay

  The Land lord’s rent

  Justice for all

  That is

  Unless you’re poor

  Endless days

  Eternal nights

  Thinking

  Worrying

  In a concrete box

  The disease

  It causes

  In the head —

  I’d rather

  Have the pox

  Because man

  Is just

  An animal

  Who needs to see

  The stars

  Free as birds

  In the sky

  Not through

  These iron bars

  There must be

  Another way

  To punish

  Penalise

  Those of us

  Who stray

  And break

  The rules

  That protect

  The taxpayers

  From us

  The reef

  Of humanity’s

  Wrecks.

  * Wajella: white person

  Holocaust Island

  Nestled in the Indian Ocean

  Like a jewel in her crown

  The worshippers of Babel come

  To relax and turn to brown

  To recuperate from woe and toil

  and leave their problems far behind

  To practise ancient rituals

  The habits of their kind

  But what they refuse to realise

  Is that in this little Isle

  are skeletons in their cupboards

  of deeds most foul and vile

  Far beneath this Island’s surface

  In many an unmarked place

  lie the remnants of forgotten ones

  Kia* , members of my race.

  * Kia: yes

  Liana Joy Christensen (b.1955)

  Idiom

  My husband gutted our bathroom this week. I removed myself to the back garden while he removed the debris of decades. Later he showed me the shell. The dark wood of the weatherboards, the patched hole where the chip heater used to be, the inevitable white ant damage. I registered the stamped logo on one wall: Hardi Flex. That’s the new stuff isn’t it? I knew the other wall between house and lean-to was blue. ‘Stabilised,’ my husband cracked hardy. He was thirteen when he first handled sheets of asbestos. My brothers’ sleepout was lined with it, a weekend’s project by dad and my uncle. I live a couple of streets away from that uncle’s old house, a carbon copy of my own in this garden suburb where every wind bears filaments. He was an old school Aussie, the sort who’d say ‘Bewdy’ without irony and ‘Your blood’s worth bottling’ and his was. He was the first person I’d heard use the expression ‘cracking hardy’. He was advising me not to when I’d come home after a fall. I had no idea what he meant. But I learned. I watched for months while he held back rage and terror at my father’s deathbed. He never lost his bottle. Dad was Olympic class at the job himself. Their lungs were full of fibre, too. My dad died. My uncle died six weeks later. And I’d give a lot to crack hardy, myself.

  Barbara Temperton (b.1955)

  Splinter

  On the first day, squalls sweep across the harbour.

  In strange rooms populated by cardboard cartons —

  cat, cartographer, plots the geography of the house —

  my hand, armed with vacuum plug, keeps reaching

  for power points located in another town.

  I’ve been cleaning the previous tenant’s fingerprints

  off the walls. Yet, no sooner is one set wiped away

  and I find another.

  On the back of the bathroom door,

  impressed in grime no cleanser will shift,

  a whole handprint: lifeline, heartline, fate.

  Outside, the rain goes.

  Cat glares from behind a closed window.

  She has ceased investigating corners,

  pacing in her wild drug-induced stagger.

  Her tail lashes.

  We are each set on sharp edges by our awareness

  of a stranger’s presence in the house.

  Night Camp

  We are strangers, again. I’ve been away.

  Galahs fret in the trees at creek edge,

  ore train sighs through the membrane of sleep,

  the bush is haunted by night.

  Beyond our clearing carpeted by gravel,

  we sought passage along lifelines of scars.

  Our palms imprinted with spinifex spines,

  how
can we know each other in the dark?

  We plot courses with the tips of our fingers

  across the contours of our bodies,

  compasses confused by magnetic north,

  we’ve no light to read our maps by.

  Then, in the moment — the blink that passes

  between one awakening and another —

  constellations shift in the vault of Heaven:

  satellites shed ballast, comets semaphore from the aether,

  the firmament is spanned by a river of stars.

  Pat Torres (b.1956)

  Gurrwayi Gurrwayi, The Rain Bird

  Gurrwayi Gurrwayi

  It’s the Rain bird call,

  Don’t hurt him or kill him,

  Or the rain will always fall.

  Gurrwayi Gurrwayi

  Gawinaman jina gambini bandalmada.

  Malu minabilga gamba bandalmada.

  Galiya yiljalgun wula widu jayida.

  Kim Scott (b.1957)

  Kaya

  Look. Listen. Or ‘Hark’ they said, in Darker

  Days; paused and heard a distant crowd,

  The sound of feet converging.

  Come close: these marks you see;

  This trace of sound, of voice and tongue,

  These footprints of an echo trailing …

  What abides in stone and earth,

  May be buried in our hearing too.

  Countless feet have formed this well trod path,

  This sinew of a journey, this one sure way …

  From far away and foreign places,

  From close to home with open faces,

  We bring our gifts of breath and song.

  The river snaking slow beside;

  The arching sky, ourselves beneath.

  Though we reach for light and stars

  Our fleshy souls they touch the earth

  Again again again; a never-dying-fall.

  Travelling, we are many peoples;

  But our footprints make us one.

  Voices grow like tongues of flame,

  And in tongues of flame the fires come …

  Applause it falls like heavy rain.

  Our old people rise from graves of ash,

  They delight again in contest

  And in challenge.

  Shoulder to shoulder we stand

  The ancestors and us;

  We stamp our feet,

  We beat our palms,

  We voice a sound that lives;

  A crowd, reborn.

  You are welcome on Whadjuk country.

 

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