* Aboriginal for beautiful girl
Tuesday 22 January 2013
Shattered Reflections
Kylie Abecca
Port Albany, WA
A broken heart, a shattered soul,
The demons within are taking their toll,
My mind is working overtime,
It’s time for me to draw the line,
Like broken shards from a crystal ball,
I have no choice but to let the pieces fall,
There’s no point in putting them back again,
Once broken and shattered, it’s never the same,
Looking back, I often wondered why,
I settled for people who only lied,
To live a life of pure honesty,
Is something that will never happen to me,
Depressing as this poem may seem,
Why don’t you read it again to see what I mean,
I often come across the wrong way,
It doesn’t seem to matter what I say,
But if you want to understand me,
Look a little closer, tell me what you see,
Behind the laugh, behind the smile,
Is a girl who’s been dragged over every hard mile,
I’m not asking for help, not asking for a hug,
I can get out of this hole, I myself dug,
Just close your mouth, keep opinions to yourself,
I know how to play with the cards I’ve been dealt,
Just leave me alone, I don’t want to hear lies,
Only honesty do I want to see with these eyes,
I can pick up and I can move forward,
A new life for me, I have to work toward,
Think what you like, shadow me with doubt,
But I will stand tall and show you what I’m all about.
Kylie wrote this poem following a sexual assault, moments before she was due to face her attacker in court. She says she is proud of this piece simply because it shows that she refused to allow another person’s actions to ruin her positive outlook on life.
Wednesday 23 January 2013
A Gate Ajar
Toni Paton
Blackheath, NSW
Today it creaks and grinds on its hinges, as it swings in the breeze.
Each day as I take a stroll, I pass this gate, always closed.
I am entranced,
I hesitate and wonder what lies beyond.
Character abounds,
A creation of weathered wood and rusting wire.
I have always been tempted to open this gate,
But have respected its trust – keeping trespassers out.
And here today it is open, inviting me through.
With reluctance I step forward, am drawn forth.
The path ahead is rugged, well used – but not for a long, long time.
I am compelled to continue.
I feel exhilarated.
Either side of my walk are patches of old time flowers, lilies, daffodils and violets,
Hinting of the past, of life, and dwellings.
Nostalgia is all enveloping.
A haze lies ahead, through it something discernible.
I edge forward and realise what I see was once a home,
Old, neglected and dilapidated.
And yet it portrays a sense of peace and calm.
I venture closer, am overwhelmed with tranquillity.
Obscurely hanging over the front door, a sign: ‘WELCOME.’
I choose not to intrude, disturb the peace.
Reluctantly I turn to walk away.
Hesitate to reflect.
How I would love to know the history of this gem.
Trudging slowly back, gazing onward,
I recognise the gate, the inspiration of my venture.
Should I close the gate?
Keeping our secret hidden from others passing by?
I shall leave it as it is,
Content, unrestricted and free.
Thursday 24 January 2013
It Will Come
Dominic Carew
Newport, NSW
In the half-light of dawn the specks of blood on her shirt appear brown and were it not for the sudden memory of his last, dying expression tumbling into her mind like a falling light, she might have forgotten the blood was his.
‘I have a request, if I may,’ he’d said politely, his accent rounded with an English sheen. ‘Take my hand young lady, grip it tight. I’m not dust until I’m dust.’ His air was light and calm as though it was not his last minute on earth but a dreamy dusk in a park with his dog by his side, a blaze in the sky and a breeze caressing his face, albeit a little coldly.
‘I want you to do something for me young lady – Rose, isn’t it? Yes – I want you to make me a little promise.’ Learned in the language of blood pressure, of heart rate, of all the medical measurements that foretell death’s presence, and knowing these were his final moments, Rose lamented deeply that hers would be the last ears into which he spoke. But she heeded the call, leant in close and let him pull the side of her head up to his face. His words whispered into her ear like a wind and echoed, shaking the hollows of her heart. She intended to promise him that his wish would be fulfilled, that she would do what she could to carry it out, but by the time she pulled away to look into his face he was dead. It was not the death itself that affected her, God knows how many of those she had witnessed, but the final, loving cast of his eyes looking back at her, as though she were his child.
The night shift is the darkest shift because the terrors come upon the dying then, when there are none of the many happenings of day to block them. Rose had become accustomed to the sight of frail, disorientated patients gripping the fringes of sheets like frightened children, revealing on speckled, time-worn hands the stories of their lives. She would stop to comfort those that she could, take a hand in hers and rub it or put a palm to a wrinkled brow or sometimes she would just stand there, not touching them at all, rocking on her toes in a soothing manner to let them know she was there. Mostly she’d be too busy to see to everyone and this caused an aching sadness that never left her so, when she finally climbed into her own bed of a morning and closed her eyes, the anguished faces of those untended patients would stare back at her from the blacks of her eyelids.
In her small apartment, with only one south-facing window, the sunlight is slow to penetrate. Her post-work ritual of undressing and showering and eating breakfast takes place in a crepuscular haze for which she, after so long under fluorescent bulbs, is grateful. The dawn twilight is for winding down so she tricks herself, or that inner part of herself responsible for discerning time, that towards her morning the night is coming.
She examines the specks on the collar of her shirt by the living-room window. As death raced towards him it wore away the walls of his lungs and filled them with blood, some of which he must have breathed onto her collar while speaking into her ear. It was not unusual to come home with stains on her clothes but she finds herself, this particular day, moved by the image of an old man’s dying breaths preserved in the white cotton fibres of her shirt. She holds the garment for some minutes in her hands, thinking all the while about his final wish, and decides, for now, to leave it unwashed.
In the bathroom she showers without light and lets the steady flow of water – its echo and its touch – soothe her. She spends long enough in front of the mirror to brush her teeth and ensure her face is clean and proper, but no longer, for she is not interested in how she looks. Was it always like this? Are young women like Rose, at some point in their youth, not greatly consumed by the world’s perception of their beauty? Perhaps they are, and perhaps Rose passed down that street, but she did not do so for long. There was too much pain in holding herself up before the world in that way; too many eyes to fill. Over time, beauty appeared more an idea than a shape and it came at her when she was very still, watching from a quiet shadow. Occasionally, in moments of what she has come to call gra
ce, death presents a kind of beauty and in those instants she feels as though nothing will ever harm her or anyone who stops to look and listen.
‘Don’t you want love?’ her mother Alice asks, a ripple of despair passing glumly through her eyes. ‘Don’t you want children?’ She is standing in Alice’s kitchen the following afternoon, the fridge beaming its messy smile of family photos and novelty magnets. She likes the old pictures, drained by time of colour, the corners curling in as though trying to shield the tawny images from final, irredeemable destruction. Rose slowly takes them in, her eyes following the same left-to-right path across the fridge as always, absorbing the pieces of her history with which she is so familiar and yet which always appear to her as new and oddly startling. Today she stops on a particularly tattered photo, faded almost beyond recognition and identifiable only by the whites of the smiles of its subjects. Don’t you want love? the smiles seem to say. Don’t you want children? Her mother reaches up and takes the picture from the fridge, holding it gently in two hands like a holy cup. ‘We were twenty-five,’ she says, with a long, indulgent blink.
‘Somewhere in Spain,’ continues Rose, knowing exactly the story of the picture, the time and date it was taken, the soft, incredibly balmy twilight unfurling around the couple on the other side of the lens.
‘He would have wanted you to have children,’ Alice says, referring to the man in the picture, the man who grew Rose up on his shoulders and whose smell – of musk and earth and coffee, of summer roads after summer rain – breathes on in a treasured hallway of her memory. He taught her many things in many ways but his favourite pearl, which he uttered daily, was to always, above all else, laugh every day as if it’s your last. He had been sick nearly a year before her parents told her the truth. They erected a pretence of wellbeing so that Rose and her sisters would not have to suffer too and so he could hold onto fatherhood for as long as possible, the one thing he loved more than anything else. At the time Rose did not know about the hospital visits and the radiotherapy, the dozen different tablets he swallowed each day. She did not hear the muffled sobs through the walls of the house in the smallest hours of morning as mother and father wept in silent, sorrowful repose. When she finally found out she remembers imagining her parents as a pair of armoured sentinels guarding a sacred, tranquil garden from packs of wolves and crocodiles and land-faring sharks. They fought like warriors she saw in Hollywood blockbusters, their backs up against garden walls, their fingers dripping blood. And even though looking back through the mesh of memory she recalls having had suspicions, her gratitude towards her heroes forever swells in her heart.
Returning the picture to its place on the fridge with gentle reverence, Alice holds back a tear quivering on the rim of an eyelid, a skill she has learned in the three years since her husband’s death and one which bespeaks, she supposes, a recovery from grief.
‘We lost an old man this morning,’ Rose says absently, as though to herself. ‘He died alone.’
Alice, facing the fridge, is quiet as she sifts through a pile of thoughts with motherly care. She initially encouraged her daughter’s decision to work with the dying though always wondered whether Rose had done so too soon after her father’s passing. In the beginning Alice, overwhelmed by the blizzard of mourning, could not see the goings on around her and lived her days in a state of functional paralysis – breathing and talking and eating, but not alive. Eventually, by an unbidden intervention of grace – for she did not ask to be saved – the ice thawed and light slowly pierced the fog. With the little reserves of energy remaining, Alice once again turned her life to her children and it was Rose, of all of them, who had changed the most. No longer were the simple preoccupations of young womanhood remotely relevant to Rose’s life, called as it was to a higher, heavier place. Her work had come to occupy all but the thinnest permitter of her time and was beginning to take the shape of an obsession which bordered, in Alice’s view, on the morbid. Today though, as ever, Alice is careful to prod with delicate strokes.
‘He didn’t die alone,’ she says, finally, ‘if you were there.’
‘He died without his family present, Mum. That’s dying alone. He died without his loved ones by his side.’
Alice turns to face her daughter and smiles wanly, revealing, as she does, concerns shifting about beneath. ‘Sometimes I think you take too much on in that job,’ she says after a beat of silence. ‘A young woman like you should be out there enjoying life, making friends. Instead you live alone with a weight in your heart.’
Rose looks down at her folded arms with her head cocked to one side and a puzzled, somewhat troubled expression in her eyes as though she cannot quite remember where she is or, perhaps even, who. After a while she raises her head and, with arms still folded, says, ‘I kind of made him a promise, just before he died, to fulfil his final wish.’
Alice’s face sinks a touch and a grim, cloud-coloured lamentation shivers out across the room. ‘Oh, Rose,’ she says, drawing her daughter into her chest, ‘this is too much.’
The two women stand there, embraced in the kitchen, holding gently the common threads of their lives in their arms, weeping a little – out of gratitude more than grief. Then, with a curious contentment Rose hears and feels but does not understand, Alice says, ‘It will come Rose. You remember that? When it comes.’ They are words her father would say in the final phase of his dying, during which he seemed to be looking through a window, away from the world, upon a profound tranquillity that awaited him. It is in these words that now, as then, mother and daughter let themselves be comforted.
As Rose is leaving, poised to step through her mother’s front door onto the street, Alice, with calm, considered conviction offers a final thought, ‘It won’t bring him back, you know.’
The wind outside abruptly kicks up and blows through Rose into the house, rattling the cupboards and causing the old ceiling lights to jingle sweetly on their strings.
‘He’s gone from us and you can’t bring him back.’
Rose pauses, feels the pulse throb in the heart of her throat and without offering a response, walks out the door.
The following day, on a street at noon, Rose bumps into a child holding a star-shaped balloon.
‘I’m sorry little lady, I didn’t see you there.’
The little girl looks up at Rose and smirks, her grip loosening on the unwieldy mass of helium swaying about above her. ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ the little girl asks.
Rose, slightly affronted but smiling, says, ‘I don’t have one.’
The little girl’s face bunches into a serious frown, her eyes narrow into serious slits, ‘But who holds your hand while you fall asleep at night?’
‘No one,’ says Rose. ‘What a strange question.’
‘Mum says a boyfriend’s job is to hold his girlfriend’s hand while she falls asleep and that’s why he sleeps in her bed.’
Rose laughs but as she does she is reminded of the old man: the grip of his hand in his last seconds; the silent, solemn quiver. Where was his wife? she thinks. Where were his children? In a sudden uprush of commotion, the little girl’s mother, puffing and panting into view, picks the child up and chides her sharply for wandering off. The balloon wriggles free and Rose and the two strangers watch as it soars frantically skyward.
‘Sorry about that,’ says the mother, grinning. ‘They’re slippery like eels, you know.’
Rose nods and smiles, but no, she doesn’t know they’re slippery. She doesn’t know much about eels at all.
A week later, on the chilly yet spring-touched edge of winter, Rose finds herself sat before the tombstone of the man that died alone. It was not difficult tracking down his resting place, what with her contacts, and the fact that he was buried in the same cemetery as her father made it all the easier. She sits for some time by his grave, considering the small, polished slab of stone which has not yet been inscribed with an epitaph. Overhead the late afternoon sky is a-swirl with whorls of cloud broken b
y ringlets of blue. A dozen shards of sunlight fall to the ground interrupting the shadows of the cemetery with soft, shimmering splashes of gold. Presently, Rose catches a glimpse of a stranger standing above the adjacent grave. He is tall and slim and drably dressed, carrying with him a small bunch of wilting flowers that seem to be suffocating in his white-knuckled grip. The man begins to watch her and she feels his glare soak into the periphery of her thoughts.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the man with a nervously hushed stammer. ‘Your father?’
Rose looks up at the stranger and, seeing his face, relaxes, for his eyes are kind, albeit wet with fresh grief.
‘No,’ she says, ‘We weren’t related.’
‘A friend, then?’ persists the man.
‘No,’ she says, ‘we weren’t really friends either.’
‘Then why are you here, if you don’t mind me asking, tending to his grave?’
Rose turns her face back to the tombstone and notices, for the first time, the vague outline of herself reflected in its surface. Somewhere nearby leaves rustle in a breath of wind and the first pinkish hues of dusk spill into the sky.
‘I came to tell him I’ll try,’ she says, without shifting her gaze, ‘to fulfil his final wish.’
‘Oh,’ says the man, bemused and faintly curious.
‘Yeah,’ continues Rose. ‘He said he wanted me to laugh every day as if it’s my last. Can you believe that? I mean, what are the odds?’
The man offers a thin, uncomprehending, desperate kind of smile, kneels down to deposit the flowers and quickly leaves, heaving heavy sobs into the heels of his hands all the way back to his car. After a time, Rose stands up, brushes a few blades of grass from her legs and, making for the streetward gates, notices the sky aching in its final burst of colour. From where she is she can see, up the gentle slope of the cemetery, her father’s grave before which she has knelt and cried so many times. Today she glimpses something moving above it, a bird maybe, or perhaps just a shadow playing tricks in the dying light. ‘It will come, Daddy,’ she whispers and the wind blows, flushing her face with fire, ‘when it comes.’ She raises her hand and waves and whatever it is that stirred her thoughts waves back and a happiness tumbles into her heart like a falling light.
So she walks.
Off to discover all of the things on which it shines.
Friday 25 January 2013
Left
John Arvan
Underdale, SA
The distant shore is always near
Our vague demise is ever clear
And what is left
Just memories
Of what was done
And what was dear
And we return
To what we were
Friday 25 January 2013 4 pm
Saturday
Susan Kay
Bellevue Heights, SA
narratorAUSTRALIA Volume Two Page 19