The Best Australian Poems 2017
Page 6
a circle of utes and unemployed old wagons
radiating out in degrees of exhaustion:
not much of a word said
for the cold of the march ahead.
The job was: excavating a fair old trench
for burying hay up to its head:
stacking, not bumbling in, the bales:
tarpaulining the whole thing,
a dozen men making a ginormous bed
expertly of the earth:
tucking in the edges with the weight
of immensely heavy, robust tyres
that had to be hiding the apertures
they had in them. Like you ever do
at that age, you attain a little grassed
hillock with an ideal view of things.
By midmorning I had picked my
vicinity of fascinating dirt bone-dry
of daffodils. The trench was then the
beginning of a knee abrasion:
the earth was pushing back with
crevasse-cracks, elastoplast-ied collarbones
of clay. Lunch was a distracted
looking-on, a flinty-eyed imagining
over sandwiches about how and
from what angle to attack things next.
Afternoon was the cruellest month,
and dusk was just unconscious will,
the bit I didn’t, and will never get.
The half-light made them all shadows
of hauling, appalling efforts. The last tyre
went down, was met with a spectral
acknowledgement. Not a soul had left
out of fear of abandonment of
any other diarised thing in their lives:
the desire to get it done, however
mental and not ergonomic that was,
was all, by the end.
William Fox
Unkempt if You Will
Unkempt if you will
mazy with grass seed and insects.
By which you read Summer.
A season warm and static. Nothing
surely can happen beyond the buzz
of the bees in the salvia. Stay here, lie
on the lawn the whole day
until its light and heat dissolve into night
until at last we must seek shelter.
Forget about the dog, unpredictable
on the boundary, the strange look
she gets in her eyes as she lunges,
hurls her longing and discontent
repeatedly against the fence.
Angela Gardner
Empirical VII
Storm water piped under the cutting comes out here,
unfolding down under the surface of itself, bluish oil-haze
clotted with seeds and insects—and down the gully
dank onion weed tracks the secret paths of water—Late winter,
black cockatoos scrap and cry in the Monterey pines
which bank the gully’s side—The water flows to a standing pool
out the back of the CSL where a metal trap stops leaf-litter and bottles
and the massed reeds are that washed-out grey
which shines at dusk—From the wetlands water is pumped
up to the golf course or sometimes floods the creek, now a concrete drain
beside the motorway into the city—Across the gully
the factory generator begins itself repeatedly—Behind the cyclone fencing
its rooves stack the horizon—Smoke from its furnaces, widening out
through shadow like scratching on a lens glass, is suddenly there,
lit coils across the brick wall of the factory, blank updraft swarming
in and out of light that whitening shiver out the back
of magic lantern slides, invented depths giving its close scenes place—
The rain is first a screen that folds in on itself its infinity of repetitions, nerve-end flares, and then the leafless furze,
its each thorn strung with unrefracted rain, is the infrastructure of a cloud
stopped on the gully’s side and at each step vacancy
scatters out of the pale tops of the grasses, untellable, singular, immune—
Lisa Gorton
Inheritance
Bigger than Christmas,
the Borroloola Rodeo announces
itself with a mushrooming of camps
as show trucks and outstations
chorus below a starlit big dipper
out on the edges of town:
I unroll my swag
with Buffalos—the Gudanji mob
from Bauhinia Downs, Cow Lagoon
and Devil Springs—where this year’s mood
is a carousel cracker in acclaim:
at the camp centre
a 55-gallon drum is suspended
between the forks of two trees
by ropes bound
to their anchor points
with the neatest of figure-eights;
a mastery of makeshift mechanical bull:
out on the edges
the kids practice their hondas,
an overhand knot with a stopper
at the end threaded through
and tightened down
to form a nearly-perfect halo,
the lasso is a dream flung
bang-on:
throughout our camp
tarpaulins hover like magic carpets
giving shade and privacy
as ropes and uprights are fastened
with rolling hitches—
a season’s banked domestic security:
and this year our ropes lash
together such calm relief
in the managed risk of a rodeo’s spills:
this year we are spared
the dawn drop and swing
when the rope is laid down
in a wide sideways “S”,
the end wrapped round thirteen
times to form a loop tightened
for the end:
this year
when dawn breaks
the bull rider’s eight second rattle
is our only breathless
yield.
Phillip Hall
Heart’s Core Lament
Charlotte oh Charlotte on whaling ship we came seized jewel-harbor country from Albany enslaved they harpooned rugged coastlines their chase was for the pull bound east-ward South Australia your body wretched under rule lamented life my Charlotte you fade without a trace a whaler’s flesh-trade cargo your terror our cold-case
The lawless manner in which these sealing gangs are ranging about requires some immediate measures to control them. From what I have learnt and witnessed, they are a complete set of pirates going from island to island along the southern coast, making occasional descents on the mainland and carrying off by force native women.
—Major E. Lockyer, 1827.
he was stolen to Poonindie blessed to tame subjugate all Bible-versed body-cursed Reverend’s call to educate Protector-issued rations the boy was trained to count and save oppression reigned with daily bread yet learned he became toiled wide-brown-land beyond his class then forced to move away
steamers glide to Coorong’s heart Taplin’s Mission Point McLeay vast glistening lakes weaving-reeds frame homes of stone and clay in nineteen-0-three I was born to my gentle mother’s hand as Superintendents penned Protectors surveillance-file demands forced on steamer once again displaced now three-times from my lands
The parents are great hindrances to the improvement of the children, and will continue to be so for several generations unless some decisive measures are adopted, to separate in a degree, the one from the other.
—M. Moorhouse, Protector, 1842.
Point Pearce Mission Station our strong grandmothers are born against blood-red far horizons against white-crosses as they mourn they rise with eyes cast hard and low church-bells toll a strict routine controlled confined objectified starved punitive regime pet
itions signed by all our men demand conditions to improve for blankets to warm our Old-Ones for young girls lost to servitude
The mission stations are doing a good work, for if the natives under their influence were not taken care of they might wander about, getting into mischief, and put the country to great expense… The half-castes are more intelligent than the pure-bloods, but they cannot reasonably be expected to come up to the standard of whites.
—M. Hamilton, Protector, 1903.
she serves her bluestone-master she falls tragic to the moon she hangs her apron-sorrow every hot-gold-hush of noon he sets her place at meal times with dogs on cold-stone floors he throws a bone nods his head makes her beg for more ‘I couldn’t bear the kitchen work’ by misconduct I abscond I run for rugged ranges to shadow winds where I belong
this drought won’t break
this drought won’t break
I could do more with them if obedience was enforced; but as it is the parents interfere so much… There is such a demand for them as raw material. They can all wash dishes and scrub floors.
—Royal Commission on the Aborigines, 1913.
this drought won’t break my country under pitiless blue sky colonial-amnesia reigns supreme over stifled ring-barked cry sick at heart my country rise-up dance for rain trace this blood-land-memory flooding through our veins bear witness our shared-history past-future stories call core of my heart my family spectral imprints shape us all
…as native citizens of this country we claim the right to have been consulted before any measure dealing with our children in this way was brought before parliament.
—E. Chester, Point Pearce, 1921.
Natalie Harkin
The Tent
I’ve had that dream again
of musk and wet
the earth a flower
reaching up beneath sawdust
for the hip bone
that presses closest to the dirt
I would not sleep
if not for the small circle of light
where the pole pushes
through the sky’s fabric
and a miniscule glimmer
of moon trickles down
the fabricated wall
when I was small
I heard the sound of a rabbit
grazing nearby
and a bull hollering on-heat
under the drape of the seasons
I thought of smaller and smaller homes
(burrows cans shells)
because of this I am able
to diminish myself
become a ball a marble
fluff
it’s as if
when the noise of the world
overruns the camp
I am safely camouflaged
but it is at night
when clothes
lie fallow
and audiences drift away
I see the soaring dirty lid
of canvas open
and the stars arranged
in a show unparalleled
Jennifer Harrison
Acrocorinth
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed . . .
—Psalm 128:2
Time has scalloped and tightly crimped
the hill’s stone—all the troughs
and rifts of its flanks studded
with cypress, laurels. The Acrocorinth
juts into wind above the yellowed vineyards
and timber pig-sheds, the fish
like wands of garnet or black-spotted quartz
carving the shallows at Vrahati beach.
My grandfather’s people
coaxed
clusters of bitter-and-sweet jade fruit
from the vines, while time—like a god’s
hand on the hill—tapped off seams
of limestone with the rain’s pick, or pounded out
trenches with fist-fulls of hail, lightning.
In the village, pines drip
resin in the brush. I walk
dirt tracks where hens pace for seed. In dusty
gardens, in olive groves, the goats swank
oily beards, the hammered scrolls
of horns, gnashing thyme thickets - the Acrocorinth
pale as whey to the south. From here
I make out the old acropolis extruding
from the hill like blunted teeth; I probe,
till my eyes ache, for Aphrodite’s
temple, nesting somewhere in the high
ridges. The Corinthian Gulf flickers
down a north-east road, and I know
this evening the sun swill strut there like a peacock
trailing long feathers across
the water. Soon, I’ll walk back
to my great uncle’s house.
He’ll empty wine from a barrel.
He’ll tell me stories of his brother’s fist.
I’ve seen the x-rays—my mother’s
dented wrist, forearm—all the fractured
bones. And I’ll think of those hands,
coaxing, on the vines; and I’ll think of a god
with a fist-full of hail. I’ll drink
the cool, bitter pink liquid, and currents
of sweetness will twist
through each mouthful.
Dimitra Harvey
Zero Degrees
Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.
Those younger ones, whose death turns
on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,
avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition.
He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting,
but won’t press the hospital buzzer because
the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames.
That vandals have broken into the cupboard
of the genial stroke victim in the bed next door
who says only, ‘Here it is’. That children are being
shorn in the corridors. That a chaotic darkness has fallen
on working class districts erased for the concrete husks
of a hulking and labyrinthine construction: apartments
for immigrants and foreign students, with mirrored windows
replicating glare to the suburban boundaries.
The view is of a miniature city in a bottle of smoke,
car pollution mingling with vaporised frost.
An extended family of currawongs gathers
expectantly for the faintest turn of leaf litter.
He requests that his communist newspapers be hidden
in case they are reported – but doesn’t say by whom –
and remembers an article he once wrote for The Nation
about poverty in the Blue Mountains: a young mother
with three clenched children, all without jumpers,
the temperature never lifting above zero degrees.
Soon a plush Pullman carriage will arrive to transport him
to the plains for further tests, flashing through all
the usual stations: Bullaburra, Linden, Warrimoo.
John Hawke
The Hanged Man
At the time of writing to you
The sun sets over Sydney Harbour
Bizet’s Carmen bursts out on the water
Full moon rises over the bridge
Valentines clink glasses and part
Clink glasses and part
In Melbourne a southerly blows across the bay
The mercury drops to thirty
Madame Sosostris sets The Lovers alight
Fireworks explode in the sky
Rainbows spread over the face of the moon
And rub out the stars
Ropes of rain drop on Esperance
Pods of pilot whales shore up to die on Farewell Spit
Cascading waters bite into America’s tallest dam
Everywhere on the planet lakes fill with fish doped on antidepressants
<
br /> Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood II (non-fiction) is released
In Paris refugees huddle together outside the Sacré Coeur where cleaners slip them Halal baguettes
In London a Tory student films himself burning a £20 in front of a homeless man
In Manhattan the Statue of Liberty cringes
At the time of writing
George Orwell has just published Twenty Seventeen (non-fiction)
At the time of writing
Maryam Mizakhani dons no Jihab but wins the Nobel Prize for mathematics
At the time of writing
China prepares for war
North Korea fires missiles into the Sea of Japan
Syria and Afghanistan bury their new dead
At the time of writing
The planet is tilting off its axis
Coal-fired power plants belch
Robotic bees are born
At the time of writing
I want to kill time
Forget all possible endings to the world
Remember the boy who launched off his bike on the gravel way
back when we were immortal
At the time of writing
Death has achieved her majority
Madame Sosostris grants you eternity
I tuck away the Hanged Man’s card
Dominique Hecq
Works Cited:
Atwood, M., The Year of the Flood, Vintage, Toronto, 2010
Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909–1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1963
Orwell, G., Nineteen Eighty Four, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984
Inchings and Belongings: After Paul Strand
1.
The building’s torn down – an irreducible light, a blow to the knee you received there, flights of literature in stacked paperbacks. We saw books gather our balcony, glancing from slow pages to that grimy world. We shook traffic noise from ears. So much to keep that we couldn’t possess, silos of being and memory suddenly at odds. When a blue-inked notice arrived we stood in outrage, debating what to do – we would not have our lives resumed. But we’d no rights in the matter and months absorbed us in shifting away. On the day of demolition Thomas Crimmins Contracting moved equipment in. Walls fell on our doings; light flooded damp ground. I saw a paper bird that looked like one you’d made last Christmas, among rubble. You’d already walked into the alleyway where the baker had been, riddling our mornings with yeasty smells. “No,” you said. We left dust to permeate that air and gathered the spectral into our seeing. We found no further words in the broken morning.
2.