Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,
that seascape with its ploughboy on the left
who pays it no attention; and, later on,
the Auden poem, published 1940,
when young men yet again, with aluminium
wings, were plunging bravely through the air
and Breughel’s ‘expensive, delicate ship’ had even
then and even now ‘somewhere to get to’
where Daedalus and Icarus, aloft
on insubstantial wings and powering through
the tricky air, are not beyond re-use.
Geoff Page
from Hawes — God’s Intruder
CP-G:
4.
Living on the Mullewa fringes
Became my people’s place
When a colonial township emerged
Like a pimple amongst the wildflowers
Foreign church structures rose
Dominating the landscape
Family showed me the quarry
From which rocks were taken
Building the Whiteman’s worship place
Close to the Mullewa Reserve
Mullewa—Morawa Road nearby
Aboriginal hands helped build that temple
Their energy and sweat is in them rocks
Their heart is in them rocks
Hawes didn’t do it on his own
Wonder if that is written anywhere?
As a child I peered into that temple
Curious why gargoyles watched the entry
Frightened to look at the statues inside
Our playgrounds included train tracks,
Wheat silos, the Common and looking into the dam
Our family had died in there—as local kids we would
Peer through the big wire fence at the dam
Wildflower season meant tourist buses
We chased the bus from Our Lady of Mount Carmel
To the Lesser Hall for the promise
Of left-over sandwiches and cakes.
JK:
5.
On the steps of the Big Church
I hesitate, unsure of what’s inside
for me. I have the sand and wheat
ships in my head, and wonder
how far they might stretch the scene.
Mum is a teacher at the high school,
and my nickname there is Dictionary.
I write poems in a laboratory.
I work weekends and holidays
in the shadows of the mineral sands
factories, preparing samples
that show the quality of the land
pouring through the capitalist
hourglass, shifting the spirit
to metals and plastics and paint.
It was rocket science. The birds
stayed away, their songs
ignored by too many. Shifting
sands. Gunslits in “settler” buildings.
We ride our bikes from Town
to Drummond’s Cove where crayfish
bristle below reefs and reef sharks
patrol the gaps, snapper glinting,
brightening the underworld.
We live opposite the prison
in a limestone house
that was home to nurses,
an old colonial mansion
taken over by the Education
Department, a statement of possession
we know is haunted, distressed.
We weather a cyclone,
we find old coins fallen
through the wooden boards.
We are part of something
we can’t quite piece together.
Mum volunteers to teach prisoners
written English, to listen to their lives.
Now, where house and yard
and Moreton Bay fig stood,
is Coles Shopping Centre
carpark. Beneficence?
For the people?
Down from there, trains
rounded on themselves,
head-to-tail on the turntable,
and the sea against the seawall,
and the curve of beach
reaching to Saint George’s
(what did he have to do with it?)
and the cobbler’s sting that undid
my nerves and had me shrieking
the agony of Champion Bay
I didn’t understand. The school
was busy re-enacting Grey’s
expedition but I knew
that wasn’t part of my vision,
though later I’d rewrite it
as a poem of decolonisation.
When I return to Geraldton,
to what part of me is there,
I rest in a dry creek bed
and listen to the river redgums,
I go to the bottomless pool
and watch the swallows
defy gravity. I know sunsets
make a coast and I listen
hoping my errors
will find redress.
CP-G:
6.
Growing up I lived opposite the Catholic Church
“Our Lady of Mt Carmel” in Mullewa
Every day I walked past Monsignor’s house
I knew nothing of their beliefs and customs
It was just a playground to take pictures
Get a cool drink from the water fountain
The gargoyles perched at the entrance did
Frightened me at night as I close my eyes
And sprinted past the church to get home—
I didn’t understand why these monsters
Were on a church building—roof at that
I still don’t care they just looked out of place
During the celebrated wildflower season
We would pose—“cute little Aboriginal kids”
For the tourist as we waited for rewards
Of cakes and sandwiches leftovers from
Their morning and afternoon teas
They probably felt sad for us—who knows!
We just got our feed and waved to them
I wrote poems and stories in a little diary
You know the ones with lock and key
And cute little girly covers
Each time finding new hiding places
From intruding little relatives and the rest
Each time having to tear up and throw away
My words, thoughts, emotions, feelings
Because there was no hiding places
The big church in Geraldton on the sand hill
Was not part of my world in Mullewa
It was there but meant nothing to me
I don’t remember it as a child or a teenager
Why should I had no business with it?
Our SDA church sat staunchly
On Maitland Road waiting for its family
We got bags weetbix, oranges, and apples
Saved us from really starving so
That’s something I guess
But that big church in Geraldton
What a poser standing there like a temple
My mum went to a wedding there in 1940s
An Aboriginal wedding at that—Catholics
I have a pic of mum leaning on outside wall
All young beautiful and a tea maid
Mum had a permit to work in Geraldton
At West End of Marine Terrace
From the Native Protection Board
Or should I say her Employer had the permit
That’s the way it was—Aboriginal people
Were controlled and couldn’t move freely
Even as a teenager coming across to the
Aboriginal Basketball carnivals
Or at the Maitland Park footy oval
I don’t recall the Big Church
It didn’t make a lasting impression
It just didn’t belong to my world
Later in life I moved to Geraldton
I drove past it, I walked past it
I stared at it from the QPT lawns
I couldn’t escape its physical presence
And what I did learn about it made me sick
The space it so grandly took over
Was once a traditional campsite
Is it coincidence that the Aboriginal
People living at the campsite were
Moved to other locations including
Moore River Native Mission?
At the same time the big takeover
Colonising church was to be built.
Oh yes the big church is grand
They pray and worship their god
Tourists come from everywhere
With their cameras to make memories
All I can think about when I see it
Is of the campsite taken over
Of our people displaced and alienated
From traditional country
Colonised space it became and stayed.
Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella
‘A Decidedly Pathological Process:
akin to falling on a pitch-
fork’,1 muscle-cut
cutpurse
purse-strings
strings attached
attachment may be
affected by birth trauma, the ‘cascade
of intervention’:2
(intervenire, fr. Latin: ‘to come between’
such as your small body intervened between
me and sleep or the secret pulse of fontanel
dividing skullplates)
Once you’ve had one episiotomy, you’ll
probably need another:
(the opiate theory of surgical cuts)
(the gateway drug for the primigravida)
gravidy, parity
(‘our stitching and unstitching has been
naught’)3 Sutures, rows
needles like oars, close parted waters
One of these was not overheard
in the post-natal ward:
a. ‘When I gave birth I had an epidural’
b. ‘When I gave birth I had an orgasm’
c. ‘When I gave birth I was in stitches’
Not a stitch on, in a bright-lit room
a stitch in time
cross stitch (‘Wanted: a needle swift
enough to sew this poem into a blanket’)
‘FORK!’
I said, as well as
‘It’s not as bad as it sounds’
And it was not, it was not
when I was cut and sutured
(‘You can cut
all the flowers
but you cannot keep spring from coming’).5
Felicity Plunkett
1 Joseph DeLee, early 20th century obstetrician, champion of the episiotomy, on the subject of birth
2 Sheila Kitzinger, ‘the high priestess of natural childbirth’
3 W.B. Yeats
4 Charles Simic
5 Pablo Neruda
Weeping Foxes
You told, or rather warned me, that the foxes would start mating soon, and that their barks and cries would be so loud and so like a woman being strangled that I would be woken by them, but that I shouldn’t worry for it would only be foxes mating in the garden.
I think it’s true that there is a time belonging to listening and a time belonging to hearing and these, I believe, are different times. Perhaps they’re not dissimilar to the crossing of the night and day that Heraclitus described: two strangers passing each other on intersecting paths, their heads pointed in opposite directions. There is difference in the crossing and the parting, but also similitude in the approach and the leaving. Do they, night and day, nod upon meeting? Are words exchanged? It would depend on the era, that is, depend on if time were present, or telling.
It’s possible that birth could be likened to the sound of a woman being strangled, but it was no matter, no matter at all. Night passed into day—he went from me into the room—and I wondered whether the moment belonging to that precise and primordial movement was why women since Antiquity have been described as the harbingers of borders, secrets, nests and masquerades—
All those who represent birth and receive life back unto themselves somehow become unlovable as soon as they are weeping, even though mating foxes too cry out and become unsettled at what they don’t recognise.
Claire Potter
Shabnam Nightwish
“You can bury them deep under, sir; you can bind them in tunnels, … but in the end where a river has been, a river will always be.”
“Thrones, Dominations”, Sayers & Walsh
was not the Pashtun lur
with sea green eyes on the cover of
National Geographic, walking back into Tora Bora,
caves of illiteracy, tunnels of childbirth,
certainty in a plum coloured burqa.
she was not the Iranian khahar leaning on a
street-side maple tree, marked from a rooftop
to leave herself in little red trickles on a
shaky hand-held film strewn to millions.
not the Somali gabar in a Dadaab tent with
litter for toys, mouthing a canister nozzle as
a teething ring, innocent to how hopes are sung
in tongues to a pin-prick moonrise.
Shabnam Nightwish, the jinn,
truant, cryptic and near in all these
women like subterranean rivers, latent and
drip-soaking the roots of sires and tectonic
plates, sunless seas of mothers and wives ferried
in caverns under sail of kismet or false ballot,
lagoons of womankind inverted and
weeping up to nourish others, invisible
‘til visited by Shabnam, night-sung to merge
in culverts, protected to learn and stream
up sinkholes of knowing, reclaim their wombs
and settle on work like shabnam, cut furrows in
slanted fields of lore, sluice tradition from
baked clods to amaryllis flowers, take possession
and reach daylight, a liberty of sea green
whirling like smokeless fire.
Hessom Razavi
Translations:
Shabnam: ‘morning dew’; Persian girls name
lur: girl (Pashtun)
khahar: sister (Farsi)
gabar: baby girl (Somali)
jinn: in Islamic Mythology, a class of spirits made from smokeless fire, capable of appearing in various forms to possess humans in benevolent, malign or neutral ways.
The Subject of Feeling
Outside the church, unmemoried,
names of the dearest
deserting me, I turn as they
load you in the hearse, set off
with a small police escort.
For a quarter of a century
we have been ramming you
in cars of various sorts,
long before the age
of ramps and hoists.
They took longer to prise you
from the giddified wreck –
two hours was the report.
Eschatology is a slow
remorseless science.
While they forged above
a woman squeezed inside
and stayed with you,
marvelled at your composure,
heard about a new daughter.
Then the subject of feeling –
why you had none in your feet.
Men ground the car with steel
and flung it open
like a sack of wheat.
Peter Rose
Night Watch
Time is elastic, its zenith fit to breaking
when you wait for the ambulance – now leaning over him,
now rushing back and forth from house to street straining
for sirens, night so dark and wet a
nd quiet out there.
Listening for breath in a slight boy of fifteen years
is an ancient art requiring silence. Kneeling on your hall floor,
ear right to his lips, beside the frenzied shouts of his father,
whose panic of pacing is the only thing he can offer him.
Your own son watches his friend from the corner,
slumped, slightly beaten, the first fire of alcohol seeming
less necessary than it might have been, not worth the effort now,
while the friend he tried to carry home lies on his side, still.
Slapping his rump to try and wake him feels like assault.
Strange to be able to do things he would never allow,
ice you run across his cheeks a cruelty. Beyond limp,
he will not jerk away, open his mud-brown eyes.
When they finally come, wearied knights of the new wars,
they cannot rouse him, tell us it’s not good, open his lids to pupils
so huge, so pitch and utterly void, his mother gasps, sinking,
and you never saw anyone so unconscious who wasn’t dead.
You make your son sit and watch. They strap on an oxygen mask,
fail to open his mouth for a tongue block, quietly ask what he took –
vodka yes, but weed? pills? needles? No. Just vodka. Straight.
‘He was kicked,’ your boy says, ‘they punched me in the head.’ And vomits.
Clipped on a stretcher, they lift him out of the hall. In the long night,
fourteen hours twisted in tubes before he rouses, you remember
they loved pizza by the swimming pool for the last three birthdays, watched
videos, Xbox, played Star Wars with Darth Vader the only enemy –
and when you turned sixteen no-one had parties at all.
Robyn Rowland
Astronomical Twilight
In a dress, in a dream
your guide points out carvings, a well to kick.
Sissy mountains slope to ground.
His fans bay in the church of Perpetual Succour.
Plane to the apron,
a rook abed, to swindle and jack.
Walk into sky when the street ends, to turbid night.
Traffic dinks around a tower.
She rotates in her garden.
The spying dog returns, flummoxed.
What a relief, her promenade or whatnot
but still the shouting,
and languor overtakes both like a victim,
his velvety daub in the ashtray,
the sewn mouths in the islands.
Parliament resumes, on a corpse.
Each path, addled and peremptory, calls
The Best Australian Poems 2016 Page 10