The Best Australian Poems 2016

by Sarah Holland-Batt

  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
/>   And the big Church was in my face

  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