The Best Australian Poems 2016

by Sarah Holland-Batt

  way too tired to think of going on with

  life as it was. There was no room for projects of small ambition

  of mere example. The appropriate would go on being perpetrated but not by

  us. In the Slovene city, the tea house drips with rust from

  the local trees. The trace of poetry in the air only with

  the mention of the dead’s name. It was a year of change here

  too. A white sea eagle in a too small tree foretold of knowledge

  disappearing; a blue-faced honeyeater would forever be our

  bird of mourning. The surety of a line paired

  with the thrusting of translation; unlabelled orange juice

  I’m drunk. Perhaps we still have grave dirt on our hands The city rumbles

  This close to the centre, the lights never go out, lovers and

  starers-into-rivers mean the bridges are never clear. As our friends

  knew, a lot of loss can inhere in a year. A whole town can

  be wiped out. A habitat, a type of mole or fly. We have their

  recorded voices of course. We can turn our backs on what

  we have and let it disappear like we’re asleep. In our

  dreams we’re being hunted in a forest that is itself endangered

  We’re passengers in a car, joking at each enjambment we survive

  Michael Farrell

  Requiem

  a sock falls from the line

  like the market

  responding to rumours of Grexit

  & it strikes him surprising

  that death makes the imagined real

  in the old-fashioned way.

  an expected text

  still changes the direction of things,

  the way every discarded beer bottle

  submerged in sediment

  readjusts the river’s current.

  when we go beyond the clouds

  we feel the collapse of dreams more keenly

  & even if all there was to lose

  was lost some time ago

  and it is the scope of that which wasn’t

  that clumsily cleaves the heart

  like a jihadi’s dull blade through

  an aid worker’s pale neck.

  Liam Ferney

  Janus

  DAMMED CHI

  SUNNET

  VINTAGE

  Toby Fitch

  Ambition Man

  The things us Murri blackfellas have to go over in life’s

  Futures is hard.

  Love’s gone bad and less money and work.

  This easy going one got the flour tea sugar our mothers and fathers worked for.

  We were black men before the lot say, Ah ah, what’s colour got to do with it?

  Well the light comes from the dark.

  May our babies never forget the black men who washed clean and were kind on the began.

  The things we men went into were hard but changes were seen.

  Now we sit as if space chases around our necks and our hands have no arts.

  To sell the spirit of the good dance we get nothing in going on.

  To let sin overtake our wind wins we will never bow down.

  Most Murri today are national

  Yes we do know the borders

  But our unity is we knew this before they told us.

  Ambition black red and gold men come forward now take us

  In songs of love and fighter rights.

  Lionel G. Fogarty

  XXXI

  I’d like to write a poem in which guru

  was in the first or second line. Then

  I’d quote from an Indian sage, pepper

  the poetry with references to love,

  add a further reference to a spicy affair,

  hope the mix was right to salt a wound.

  Cinnamon opens the heart. Avoid cumin

  if you’re in a courting mood. Matchbrokers

  know this. A bride must serve papadums

  fried in sesame oil if she’s to woo a lover.

  The bond’s snapped, what’s left to pick over?

  I won’t anoint myself with turmeric

  or saffron powder. There’ll be no garland.

  I’ll fry some sweets then dip them in syrup.

  Tina Giannoukos

  from Empirical

  V

  Now I will walk again into this field of wreckage

  which is my starting place—On its stone heaps the tussock

  is dry stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel

  tendrils from the root—A single cloud

  now coming in over the motorway on slow dissolves of light—

  Along the cutting’s side speargrass with a rain wind in it

  moves through the shape of a catching fire—This

  stoppedness before rain in which years I have forgotten

  invent a landscape still in what I have named landscape—

  ruinable, incandescent, piece by piece drawn

  into that blank in thought which sets the names

  in their array—tussock, speargrass, wild fennel—bright charges

  hung upon abyss—Do you remember?

  In head-high grass, its pale seedheads, the wind is massing

  light, lights moving in place and scattering down—

  At the level of my eye the grass untidy, touchable, steeply

  its slant stalks narrowing back into their likeness—

  A train which even now is sending its long cry back

  out of the vanishing point it keeps discovering from the scene—

  The rain is first a prickling sound and then hand hair eyes all

  touch and does not know me walled in itself, its dazzling blank—

  The road will come through here—

  Lisa Gorton

  The Latter Days

  I sit on the porch in darkness

  and imagine I have been assigned to watch here on my own.

  At 3 o’clock everyone is sleeping,

  no distant drone

  of a car now, nor bird chirping.

  Downhill, there was wiped from the town

  the last house-lights, as if they were moisture.

  The main street goes on

  beyond its lamps, which are pinches of salt, and becomes among the landscape

  a javelin thrown.

  There is an engorged moon

  and the coarse-ground stars, and there’s one sullen light across the valley –

  a farmhouse, on its mountain,

  beneath the folded plumage of the sky.

  The range there

  is crumpled, as the blanket is

  I have drawn about me. I am reminded by that blood-shot glare

  I was tonight in Hades,

  or believed so. I went down through a gate in the marshland,

  in a reek of sulphur,

  and passed below what must have been a lintel,

  into thin flavourless metal air.

  Then I realized that the souls in Hades

  cannot change, since they’ve been judged,

  and I understood, too late, there was no point in seeking

  my father’s bitter face among the Shades.

  Yet I must go on.

  It was not for revenge – there is only grief.

  Although I have grown old

  this is an ageless wound.

  The regret is for his chances, all lost in dissipation. That is as difficult

  as always, and growing older, it would seem,

  has served no purpose at all.

  I thought I came there through a forest, where the trees howled like dogs.

  Thick as the leaves of an endless autumn

  that I had trod

  in the wilderness, on the river bank

  were the dead,

  swept together, wearied,

  who waited for a ferry, which would mean their journey was almost ended.

  Somehow I stepped across the S
tygian water,

  and Pluto sat in the plain, as though a crag upreared.

  Proserpine lay along his side,

  under a pall of steamy darkness.

  They were draped in cerements, from their lustreless crowns to the ground,

  and I could not see her beauty,

  for which she was snatched away

  while gathering flowers in the meadows of Enna.

  The tremulous souls on the bare plains behind her

  were more numerous than grass might have been.

  Then my father appeared

  on a single warp in the atmosphere

  (while the hands of the dead fell upon me

  in a feeble rain). And of course he was as he must always remain –

  he had no guilt, not even feigned,

  no greeting for me. As in the nursing home,

  I felt him demand, of earth and of the zenith, ‘Get me out of here.’

  Pitiful spirit,

  born of an ill-featured star,

  hollowed by thirst, he seemed to say, with all of his old extremity,

  ‘There is no crime

  I would not commit

  to be born again, and take my chances on earth.’

  Young men blame others, and old men themselves, except for him.

  And his clamour was sealed away

  in the human quicksand of the crowd.

  For a while, they have their little dreams there

  that show them they are sleeping.

  But no one can live forever, not even the dead. They will fade.

  It is suggested

  in Virgil that only a few heroes ever reach

  the shimmering light-filled uplands of the blest, Elysium.

  Then I found I had got up and was leant against the railing,

  to feel on my face the tender

  incandescence of the dew.

  There was a snarl

  of lightning, where it threw itself along the horizon.

  I brought a drink out

  and saw, in passing, the piled-up cold woodash trickle

  in the grate, as when a breeze,

  memento mori,

  stirs among the feathers of a guinea fowl.

  The advantage of having sought an education

  was Virgil as companion,

  although, of course, he did not condescend

  to walk with me. I had for a guide-book

  what was made of him by Dryden,

  in sufficient accuracy.

  I knew what one must do: that in Hades you break off

  the candelabra of a bough

  from out of a misty tree; each flame

  on this becomes gold-leaf, and you carry it before you

  onto the wide steps

  that lead steeply into darkness, welling from below.

  The branch is for Proserpine, an offering,

  its small light

  to be planted in her shadow, although it will not flourish.

  One time, we greeted our father as ‘Mr Shellfish’,

  playing with a remark our mother had made.

  He ignored us

  except to point out that Horace found abhorrent

  any violation of the ordinance of nature

  such as was involved in calling him a crab.

  He contended that his pension was meant for him,

  who’d been infested with TB, while mired on a side-line

  of the War. If our mother reminded him that this was self-inflicted,

  and was exacerbated

  continuously, he would retaliate by wounding us

  with the porcelain claw

  of his disdain.

  I associate him always with the Latin authors. He seemed to believe

  their language was his, to keep alive.

  It was in him an exoneration. For such remarks as the one above,

  when I came to understand it,

  I would have carried him on my back,

  out of his ruins.

  I have a neighbour, along the hillside,

  an old woman who loves to read.

  She goes to bed early, and I imagine that when she is tired

  she folds her glasses on the bedside stand

  and then her arms, in the same way, on her punctured chest,

  and is at rest. Now at dawn, this woman shouts

  into the paddocks, and her dog shouts back. It tells her

  to exult. She has her fulfilment.

  What appears to be an armful of wattle is brought to us here

  at daybreak and at nightfall,

  lightly, without piety or desert – I see it being carried for me

  from the rim of the world,

  among the bushland’s broken foliage.

  And I had wondered, while wandering in the mazed ways of last night,

  how I was to reach

  the light again. Then I realized

  that where I found myself, amid all the emphasis

  on stasis,

  can be seen through, as a delusion. It vanished from me, like eluding a theme

  in the glissando of a violin.

  Our imagination is something more dreadful than the truth,

  although it is an essential affliction.

  Take Deiphobus, who was called ‘bashful’

  in Dryden’s rendering

  of his story, since he was beautiful, but his nose and ears had been sliced off,

  and he knew it was Helen,

  his wife, who had betrayed him, beside her first husband Menelaus.

  (I suppose she felt that she had beauty enough for them both.)

  Such knowledge, it was conjectured,

  meant he must live

  for the extent of a hundred lifetimes, to be rid of animus.

  In life, everything is insecure and arbitrary,

  we’ve innumerable opportunities

  for taking affront.

  The only solution is not to be.

  The dead exist for none but the living. If we pursue them

  their souls smell in Hades. We turn away.

  They are ashes to ashes and dust on the wind.

  Robert Gray

  Royalty

  for millad Gudanji Miller & Raggatt mob

  I drove out bush with family

  again to Jayipa

  a catfish hole lined

  with paperbark and river gum

  and those gleaming quartzite outcrops

  like a silver and zinc plinth encompassing

  dark sheet water:

  we hopped, stinging, across the baked

  earth, a tessellated black

  soil with small sand drifts gathering

  to the decaying stone-boiled edges:

  and while nana fired

  a billy, weaving

  pandunus frond sieves

  we all crashed, energised

  in the brown water’s warm wash:

  in the late afternoon

  cool relief as pop arrived to dig

  a bush-turkey ground-oven

  we all set to work:

  the boys

  took a cast net and hand lines

  for barra

  while the girls hunted

  in water, feeling

  in the mud

  for waterlily bulbs, onions and yams:

  later they tap-danced the mud

  sweetening our outlook –

  a seismic detection service reading

  for hibernating turtles –

  a shelled familial finery:

  at nightfall

  our guts tight

  with their fill we fired

  the billy and traced

  stars as pop smoked us

  in quandong, picking us up:

  and nana sang country, rousing

  the scrub

  and a rainbow’s payback on this mine’s seepage,

  and another’s foreshadowed hole in our burial grounds,

  mucking us up

  making us sick.

>   Millad: is Kriol in the Gulf region of northern Australia for the first person plural pronoun: we, us, our.

  Gudanji: one of four surviving Indigenous language groups in the Northern Territory’s Gulf of Carpentaria.

  Phillip Hall

  Cultural Precinct

  Reflecting on Tarnanthi, a Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art.

  All this creating speaking breathing on Kaurna country demands more than just an acknowledgment of a peoples past present and future, for this place, this space, is abundant with stories and strong families who have always had agency, moving through and resisting what this particular cultural-precinct represents: Tarnanthi - rise, come-forth, spring-up, appear – right here, in this potent-place, you will find Festival offerings beyond a feast of art, for this cultural-precinct along Adelaide’s North Terrace is no easy place for everyone to navigate…. these limestone walls whisper a conglomerate fragmented journey that has lead us, toward this day, surrounded by precious gifts like these images, these hanging skirts, these glass bush-yams, these baskets, and now, in this moment, I call on you to reflect on the very walls from which they hang….

  these limestone walls frame institutions of power shape the main story this colonial ‘free’ State / these North Terrace statues bronzed famous faces symbols of colonialism Empire-revered / next door the Parade Ground original quarry raw materials morph grand buildings abound / limestone mined from this old Kaurna campsite Red-Kangaroo stories ripped from the ground / these limestone walls these limestone walls / consider this Armory that housed a morgue cells and gallows watch our people hang / see mounted police perform military functions ‘pacified’ our warriors on colonial frontiers / these wretched walls this Armory building hear horses-hooves gallop on cobblestoned blood / this limestone heritage revered cultural-precinct our bodies stolen de-fleshed and preserved / these limestone walls these limestone walls / consider this place the South Australian Museum their proudest collection wins the Empire’s great race / an uncanny replica London’s Natural History Museum but what is ‘natural’ about their history of this place? / they ‘set up camp’ on great expeditions to study and collect us ‘experts’ in teams / their cabinets of curiosity their objects and specimens their racialised hierarchy our human remains / these limestone walls these limestonewalls / the Migration Museum was the old Protector’s Office the Rations Depot the Colonial Store / blankets and flour sugar and tea the removal of children the first Kaurna school / and behind the Art Gallery the Radford Auditorium the ammunitions-store for military-police / then a storage-place for Aboriginal Records where paper-trails trace surveillance and control / consider the paperwork the archiving process to consign and classify this resource maintained / consider this fantasy monolith-archive its stunning all-knowing so easily sustained / these limestone walls these limestone walls / strive to navigate this violent place be still and listen there are waterholes here / these fresh water springs flow a limestone-memory erode and expose our truth will appear.