Forgiven.
After forgiveness,
Silence.
Picnic
On a green sweep of Kings Park grass
dappled with late summer shadow
I joined a picnic with Afghani refugees,
sat sedately with the women
demure but spritely in their hijabs,
kids darting, tossing balls,
larking around, politely into food.
Meat balls, hummus and tabouli
mingled with our sizzled sausages
on paper plates. Coke and juice.
Someone had found work.
Someone had been accepted as
a lab technician. Someone’s husband
still in detention three years on.
Did she get to see him?
No, couldn’t get time off,
after school the kids alone
and so on.
Under a far-off tree their fathers,
uncles, brothers brooded, a still
silent circle squinting into sunlight
smoking, looking straight ahead.
Nobody seemed to be thinking of
a better world, nobody was asking
for more than a place to sit quietly
and wait. What weighs the heart must
sit it out till nightfall for release
once everyone’s asleep.
And even then …
Watching all this, in and out of it,
remembering my own young wifehood
as a stranger, my first child born
in an alien tongue, the grey apartment block,
the cold, the speechless folk who passed
without a nod or smile, the men who carried
boxed piled with lurid neckties
from the Krawattenfabrik upstairs.
A condemned building.
Where would we all end up?
The tenants roused the concierge: the baby cries
all night, that pram is blocking the foyer.
Tell the foreigner.
I took it six flights up
and six flights down on sunny days.
Wasps clustered over cherry jam,
the tiny kitchen, scrubbed washboard.
Hovering useless over the baby’s wheezy breath,
I rarely ventured out, avoided peak hours
in the cellar armed with shameful nappies,
took my turn with dread before
the commune’s idol: a glossy water-driven
centrifuge. Its thick black snout
writhed serpentine around the tub,
soap-scummed water spewing forth
from flood-tide whine to whizz
to final cataract. Mesmerised, I bowed.
‘Anyone can marry and have children,’
said my mother far away in cloud-cuckoo
land of Oz, savage with disappointment
for her accomplished daughter, all
the dead scherzos and maimed fugues.
My mother-in-law noted dust balls
gathering under the bed, the wilting
red geraniums in their box,
the cobwebbed pane.
I didn’t join the turbaned band
of broad-arsed women lugging rugs
each day to the courtyard rack,
beating out the grey frustration of
their lives with rattan canes.
‘She ought to be ashamed of all that dust.’
My mother-in-law’s precise Hochdeutsch.
You’d think my husband’s life with me
grievous enough without her fretful chorus.
Months like this as Zürich wives and
spinsters, buttoned to the neck in black,
twitched yellowing curtains, pursed their lips,
beat their fraying carpets in the yard:
tumbled boxes of neckties passing up and down
under their wordless bearers,
wasps landing, taking off.
And I, both in and out of it,
learning how to live a life,
sit quiet in a cold place
waiting to touch the sun-warmed earth.
William Grono (b.1934)
Separation
Today we decide to tell the children.
We find them watching two toy-like
spacemen cumbersomely perform a task
on TV’s version of the moon.
They absorb the news, are quiet, watchful.
Surrounded by their costly litter,
the astronauts salute their flag
standing stiffly in the lack of air.
Peter Jeffery (b.1935)
Pompeii in Australia
While bodies turn brown and drown in oil
The beach blocks burn in the sun,
Pompeii by the Australian sea.
Sand drifts in lava folds across the bulldozed scrub,
And motorboats make frivolous surf upon the sea.
Low trees with leather leaves
Hover about the stone barbecue,
To watch the cinders of black flies
Drift down to half cooked meat,
Away to a half filled glass of marsala,
Across to a drunken sleeping hammocked man.
Over and up in an ecstasy of riches
Vomited up thicker than Christmas pudding.
Art does not redeem Eros here,
Enmeshed limbs lie not on perspiring walls
But on casual beds in dissarray.
Only the cats stalk the grass with grace,
While their owners snore grosser than flies.
Randolph Stow (b.1935 d.2010)
The Land’s Meaning
For Sidney Nolan
The love of man is a weed of the waste places.
One may think of it as the spinifex of dry souls.
I have not, it is true, made the trek to the difficult country
where it is said to grow; but signs come back,
reports come back, of continuing exploration
in that terrain. And certain of our young men,
who turned in despair from the bar, upsetting a glass,
and swore: ‘No more’ (for the tin rooms stank of flyspray)
are sending word that the mastery of silence
alone is empire. What is God, they say,
but a man unwounded in his loneliness?
And the question (applauded, decided) falls like dust
on veranda and bar; and in pauses, when thinking ceases,
the footprints of the recently departed
march to the mind’s horizons, and endure.
And often enough as we turn again, and laugh,
cloud, hide away the tracks with an acid word,
there is one or more gone past the door to stand
(wondering, debating) in the iron street,
and toss a coin, and pass, to the township’s end,
where one-eyed ’Mat, eternal dealer in camels,
grins in his dusty yard like split fruit.
But one who has returned, his eyes blurred maps
of landscapes still unmapped, gives this account:
‘The third day, cockatoos dropped dead in the air.
Then the crows turned back, the camels knelt down and
stayed there,
and a skin-coloured surf of sandhills jumped the horizon
and swamped me. I was bushed for forty years.
‘And I came to a bloke all alone like a kurrajong tree.
And I said to him: “Mate — I don’t need to know your name —
Let me camp in your shade, let me sleep, till the sun goes down.”’
Merry-go-round
This is the playground circumnavigation:
The leap in space and safe return to land,
Past sea and hills, boats, trees, familiar buildings,
Back to the port of one assisting hand.
Adventurers learn here, but do not venture
Yet from their c
ircular continuous sweep
From start to start. Where going is homing-turning
Nothing is lost, what’s won is all to keep.
The gulls stoop down, the big toy jerks and flies;
And time is tethered where its centre lies.
Penelope
Exhausted summer. New sails in the roadsteads are
the flags of homelessness: like you, a hearth.
Like you, I say. In the cool great rooms where dawn
unclouds as from a metal cup just emptied
and in the warm peach-coloured rooms by lamplight
I say: ‘Like you. Thus — thus — she was like you.’
Where have been all my sailings, all my islands,
but here, by you, in search of you, my island,
whose pools, palms, dunes I feigned to find in others,
not doubting those dissembled, I dissembled.
Till, in dawn rooms, by evening under lamplight,
turning, I find you: all my quest, and yet
(changed by my searching, borrowing from those others)
more than I left; not less than both our lives.
Simplicities of summer fall to drift.
Your eyes distrait. Your eyes tell me of seas,
not without love, only, like mine, recalling
seasons removed, an air, an immortal spring.
The sailmakers whistle, they work at the flags of famine.
I sail for earth’s end, where you wait, in immortal spring.
Persephone
Snow greys the streets that the molten pewter river
cleaves: O love, as your cloven city cleaves you.
Cloven, I came to your other, your winter world,
intending harm (you had done me such springlike harm).
Coming to force an encounter, and a crisis:
for spring’s wound throbbed in the frost, till the blood was stirred
against the voice that had said I must not follow
— ‘O love, I would die — see, love, I have died for you.’
I came with the wound of spring to the winter city
that holds my spring in one of ten million lodgings
to find you, free you, uproot you, most tender-rooted
hybrid, who must half die if I have my will.
And every street threatened irremediable meetings;
promised to turn upon me your winter face,
saying winter words. And love, I was afraid.
Yet I would have you know I have been, and gone.
I would have you think of me on another island
where it is never quite spring, but an ache and waiting,
foreshadowed nostalgia, voices once heard half-heard.
Ruins of the City of Hay
The wind has scattered my city to the sheep.
Capeweed and lovely lupins choke the street
where the wind wanders in great gaunt chimneys of hay
and straws cry out like keyholes.
Our yellow Petra of the fields: alas!
I walk the ruins of forum and capital
through quiet squares, by the temples of tranquillity.
Wisps of the metropolis brush my hair.
I become invisible in tears.
This was no ratbags’ Eden: these were true haystacks.
Golden, but functional, our mansions sprang from dreams
of architects in love (O my meadow queen!).
No need for fires to be lit on the yellow hearthstones;
our walls were warmer than flesh, more sure than igloos.
On winter nights we squatted naked as Esquimaux,
chanting our sagas of innocent chauvinism.
In the street no vehicle passed. No telephone,
doorbell or till was heard in the canyons of hay.
No stir, no sound, but the sickle and the loom,
and the comments of emus begging by kitchen doors
in the moonlike silence of morning.
Though the neighbour states (said Lao Tse) lie in sight of the city
and their cocks wake and their watchdogs warn the inhabitants
the men of the city of hay will never go there
all the days of their lives.
But the wind of the world descended on lovely Petra
and the spires of the towers and the statues and belfries fell.
The bones of my brothers broke in the breaking columns.
The bones of my sisters, clasping their broken children,
cracked on the hearthstones, under the rooftrees of hay.
I alone mourn in the temples, by broken altars
bowered in black nightshade and mauve salvation-jane.
And the cocks of the neighbour nations scratch in the straw.
And their dogs rejoice in the bones of all my brethren.
Still Life with Amaryllis Belladonna
In a sudden stillness
the Easter lilies she gave me
from her jungle garden
occupy the room.
Could she have known?
Eyes locked on eyes
hands locked on hands.
So was rapt Amyclae
undone by silence.
Two watches whisper
and on the table
a little scented pollen falls.
Glen Phillips (b.1936)
Spring Burning
I stood thigh deep
in wild oats on
a roadside verge
of mine. This spring
greening had plumped them.
The full heads nodded
heavy on emerald fibre optic shafts
and swayed in the breath
that shook
the loose-leafed eucalypts.
And yes, summer
would come like a
brazen border-invader
soaring up the stalks
with a brief
rinse of gold
before husks become pale flags
fluttering
at the edge of farms.
Then we must think
a falling spark
of conflagration
in this dry grass
could sweep for miles.
Better to act now!
A spring burning
would see us safe
all summer long.
But still I stood;
whichever way
I looked, the road
stretched on and on.
After all, this
was just another
growing oat crop.
It’s hard to clear
the feral off
your property.
Then I felt spring
still burning
in me.
Fourteen Tankas for Salt-Lake Country
I
of my birth salt lakes extend
water’s brief service
of slanting rainshowers: old
maps, old continents survive
II
This night, waterbirds
gabble, hoot softly across
lake’s lap-lapping dark
as the moon mounts my shoulder
to show where new songs start.
III
Enamelled black / white
stilts from arctic Asian tracts
come down to strut here
on these sleek, bleached salt-lined strands,
in wind-shaken chill waters.
IV
So often lakes shape
the outline vestiges of
most ancient rivers.
But these broadwater shadows
flow only now with cloud shapes.
V
A lime lake’s ripple
driven by the fresh south wind
foams to asses’ milk
on the far boundary shore.
In this lapping mouth trees ache.
VI
Lakes reach out to the skies.
They draw from vaulted cobalt,
give clouded image
back, their ruffled faces still
these sleep-creased faithful imprints.
VII
Stepped out like fence-posts
stalking pylon towers stitch
these summer salt-lakes,
freeze-dried by the moon’s cold shafts.
Salt crystals speak with quiet hate.
VIII
This white visitor
returns in my curtained dreams
peering through the lace
of branch and bole to give me,
telegraphically, the moon.
IX
Children skirt lake’s edge
their mallee sticks at the trail.
They scribe this day’s paths
of circumnavigation,
prod that blind white eye of salt.
X
The crunch of the salt
measures every stride we take
on crystals yearning
upward to avenge the plough.
How much salt does a man need?
XI
At pebble height, wind
chases and scours the brown lake’s
tabula rasa.
And samphire circles searching
ways to educate this space.
XII
Salt lakes say to us,
‘The second law of thermo
dynamics? Damn you
for doubting with your axes,
with your seeds sown in furrows!’
XIII
Death spoke to me then,
‘See the fence-posts there, leaning
into the saltmarsh,
the wires festooned with driftweed?
This is where your fences lead.’
XIV
Down by the dry lakes
the hospital crouched in dust,
salt waited for my birth
and the Southern Cross turned in
a night sky of gravidence.
Gordon Mackay-Warna (n.d.)
Grassfire
Tapi in Nyiyaparli
Purungu karla kampapi warnili
yilkarila ngalingmarra kurungkali
wirpingka Kurtanakurtana parrkapa
karlakungkuru jirntalara kalpampa
piimaralu karnalpi Marngkurtu parnti pungkupungku junngarrii
karnara yurntu manyankarra
yilkarila ngalingmarra
The faint glow of a burning fire
Is stretched over a cloud in the sky —
There is tall spinifex grass around Kurdanakurdana.
The fire roars and sparks burst from charcoal,