The consolation of a lightly rising breeze.
My Daughter Reading
For Chay
My daughter reads in a white hammock,
Suspended high in our Cape lilac.
Its pervasive scent is a sweet mauve smoke
Wafting across the yard to where I sit.
It lulls my worry on a gentle thermal,
My anxiety that she might tumble,
Tipped from the perch of her green thoughts,
And the day stay indifferent and lovely.
She has chosen an old calico sheet,
Slung herself between two sturdy forks,
Hauling an encyclopaedia after her.
She has constructed this place carefully,
A paradigm of a child’s thinking:
It is hung across a clear half-moon
Frosting white in the afternoon.
From there she can watch red wattlebirds
Sip the indigo evening and goshawks,
White as salt, hunt geckoes in the scrub,
The sea a blue presence in her imaginings.
(She has seen a unicorn from up there).
Squinting at the emerging flecks of stars,
She queries which one is a planet.
Walking to her I call upwards, asking
The title of the book she ponders.
Tree of Knowledge her smile calls back.
My unease rises with the evening wind.
Later, she climbs down, takes me to safety,
A risk negotiated, a lesson learnt,
Moonlight bleaching the shifting sand we tread.
David Brooks (b.1953)
The Pines, Cottesloe
Firetails
tunnel through banksia,
worms
bore into bast and phloem
or turn about the dark root
half-blind in earthblack.
Behind the house
in a stand
of tall radiata
white cockatoos
are ripping the tight young
pinecones into flight.
Beneath them
between trunks
already knee-deep in twilight
a garden-spider
is weaving a huge night star
and I can hear
in the long grass
something stirring.
Already
in twos and threes
the gulls are returning
and one late crow
labouring like a man in mid-channel.
For a moment
retracing the path
I am half in love
even with his dark wings, coal-
black and shining.
coming back
again and again
at nightfall
to rest in the high pines.
Philip Collier (b.1953)
Grave Change
In my Grandmother’s
stories are pioneer
parrots cursing
fucked out harlots
who in wide west
streets twirl the sun
off parasols
into pubs of gritty miners
surfacing
blownout in beers
and sagging
desert winds.
Death
was the caving in
of a widow’s eyes
a dry dust dance
she’ll lie soon settling in
outback obituaries
terse as her stories
of heydays of death
opening the west
in a graveyard
of mines.
Goldfever’s miserable
paydays she keeps
spitting
lit her Louis’ dynamite
fag as he keeps
going down mad
mines of her memory.
I’ve listened at
the edge of deepening
graves of greed
disease and madness
to her falling
silent as talk
of these deaths
gets her down.
Her parrot goes on
about nothing
changing: red lights
on sagging
blownout miners.
Death
finally with her
eighty years on
high flights of steel
eyed magnates staking
the sun’s heart
as sick winds blow
yellowcake dust
from caravans of trucks
out of her land
frontiered again
with graves.
Philip Mead (b.1953)
There’s Small Grass Appearing on the Hill-side
There’s small grass appearing on the hill-side
and many abandoned orchards in the valley
the wake of time rolls out behind each traveller in an oily V.
Good morning, you’re feeling full of advantages,
at speed, our wishes populate the echoing room
sunlight floods the market-place, for a while
we always strive to live sometime in the near future
where the horns rattle and the journeys are through winter —
slow code sounds through the concourse at night
representations are seductive, like tomorrow’s interview
or a being from another orbit of existence, leaving us in peace.
There’s scraps of mist in the hawthorn hedges, now that you can see
the peninsula might be where you end up, like a jig-saw piece
coming over the Sympathy Hills, looking down on Impression Bay.
Robert Walker (b.1953 d.1984)
Solitary Confinement
(Died 4.30–5.00 a.m., Tuesday 28th August 1984 in Fremantle State Prison. Aged 25.)
Have you ever been ordered to strip
Before half a dozen barking eyes
Forcing you against a wall —
Ordering you to part your legs and bend over?
Have you ever had a door slammed
Locking you out of the world,
Propelling you into timeless space —
To the emptiness of silence?
Have you ever laid on a wooden bed –
In regulation pyjamas,
And tried to get a bucket to talk —
In all seriousness?
Have you ever begged for blankets
From an eye staring through a hole in the door
Rubbing at the cold air digging into your flesh —
Biting down on your bottom lip, while mouthing ‘Please’?
Have you ever heard screams in the middle of the night
Or the sobbings of a stir-crazy prisoner,
Echo over and over again in the darkness —
Threatening to draw you into madness?
Have you ever rolled up into a human ball
And prayed for sleep to come?
Have you ever laid awake for hours
Waiting for morning to mark another day of being alone?
If you have never experienced even one of these,
Then bow your head and thank God.
For it’s a strange thing indeed.
This rehabilitation system!
Andrew Lansdown (b.1954)
Between Glances
It is a liquidambar, the tree
I planted two months ago
beside my study. Green and
leafy then, it is almost bare
now. A little twiggy thing.
One red leaf flutters from it
like a child’s hand. For a week
it has been waving to me,
wanting my attention, trying
to tell me something unknown
to eucalypts and evergreens.
Something European or Japanese.
Something sad and deciduous.
That brave beautiful leaf,
beckoning the eyes as a flame
beckons the palms. All day
it has warmed me. Exquisite,
that small wind-chafed hand,
its familiar flutter. I glance
down at my work then out
again, only to find it gone.
Gone between glances. If only
I had known that last wave
was a goodbye, a farewell,
I would not have looked away.
Emergence
Cicadas have left their cuticles
clinging to the daisy stems:
brown shells, burst at the back
of the thorax. Emergent, one
is exquisitely veined in aqua,
its wings soft as membrane.
Soon its juices will blacken
and its wings become cellophane.
Then it will tick, metallic
and fast, like an engine cooling.
Shane McCauley (b.1954)
The Dissolution of a Fox
For an instant the perfect grass-framed
dead body of a fox, stretched
but as if still running in its sleep,
red-brown perfection of fur,
pointed ears, mouth agape with effort.
Then camera’s rapid fast forward
and the eye can scarcely unsort
pieces of this puzzle quickly enough:
as it rushes through unravelling time
animal becomes tufty carcass, insects
like vast columns of removalists
move in. Fox fades to outline, as if
nature has insisted on taking all traces
of its triumph and hoarding it in air.
The Cosmonauts Smell Flowers
Legs limp from treading so many stars
They rest in deck chairs set for them on the steppes
Of Central Asia; they have pressed faces
Against the universe for 175 days,
And now white lined hands clutch at bouquets.
All they have seen are stars and spaces
Between them, now their smiles are for earth alone.
Feet are yet too light to appreciate stone,
Heads hang forward, senses ache at the flowers.
175 days without flowers and the world denies
Them strength to hold its fragrance.
With shy eagerness they accept the welcome,
Try to forget the machine they floated in the skies.
Here is cold wind, sunlight to shine on bayonets,
Men heavy as history, a future frightened
By the past. But for stilted moments these men
From great space can feel a minute goodness:
Noses touch petals, stars of pollen stare from the cups.
Graeme Dixon (b.1955 d.2010)
Prison
Prison
what a bitch
Brutality
Savageness
Depression
Is all caused by it
Must’a been
A wajella*
Who invented this Hell
Wouldn’t know
For sure
But but by the torture
I can tell
To deny
A man freedom
Is the utmost
Form of
Torment
Just for
The crime
Of finding money
To pay
The Land lord’s rent
Justice for all
That is
Unless you’re poor
Endless days
Eternal nights
Thinking
Worrying
In a concrete box
The disease
It causes
In the head —
I’d rather
Have the pox
Because man
Is just
An animal
Who needs to see
The stars
Free as birds
In the sky
Not through
These iron bars
There must be
Another way
To punish
Penalise
Those of us
Who stray
And break
The rules
That protect
The taxpayers
From us
The reef
Of humanity’s
Wrecks.
* Wajella: white person
Holocaust Island
Nestled in the Indian Ocean
Like a jewel in her crown
To relax and turn to brown
To recuperate from woe and toil
and leave their problems far behind
To practise ancient rituals
The habits of their kind
But what they refuse to realise
Is that in this little Isle
are skeletons in their cupboards
of deeds most foul and vile
Far beneath this Island’s surface
In many an unmarked place
lie the remnants of forgotten ones
Kia* , members of my race.
* Kia: yes
Liana Joy Christensen (b.1955)
Idiom
My husband gutted our bathroom this week. I removed myself to the back garden while he removed the debris of decades. Later he showed me the shell. The dark wood of the weatherboards, the patched hole where the chip heater used to be, the inevitable white ant damage. I registered the stamped logo on one wall: Hardi Flex. That’s the new stuff isn’t it? I knew the other wall between house and lean-to was blue. ‘Stabilised,’ my husband cracked hardy. He was thirteen when he first handled sheets of asbestos. My brothers’ sleepout was lined with it, a weekend’s project by dad and my uncle. I live a couple of streets away from that uncle’s old house, a carbon copy of my own in this garden suburb where every wind bears filaments. He was an old school Aussie, the sort who’d say ‘Bewdy’ without irony and ‘Your blood’s worth bottling’ and his was. He was the first person I’d heard use the expression ‘cracking hardy’. He was advising me not to when I’d come home after a fall. I had no idea what he meant. But I learned. I watched for months while he held back rage and terror at my father’s deathbed. He never lost his bottle. Dad was Olympic class at the job himself. Their lungs were full of fibre, too. My dad died. My uncle died six weeks later. And I’d give a lot to crack hardy, myself.
Barbara Temperton (b.1955)
Splinter
On the first day, squalls sweep across the harbour.
In strange rooms populated by cardboard cartons —
cat, cartographer, plots the geography of the house —
my hand, armed with vacuum plug, keeps reaching
for power points located in another town.
I’ve been cleaning the previous tenant’s fingerprints
off the walls. Yet, no sooner is one set wiped away
and I find another.
On the back of the bathroom door,
impressed in grime no cleanser will shift,
a whole handprint: lifeline, heartline, fate.
Outside, the rain goes.
Cat glares from behind a closed window.
She has ceased investigating corners,
pacing in her wild drug-induced stagger.
Her tail lashes.
We are each set on sharp edges by our awareness
of a stranger’s presence in the house.
Night Camp
We are strangers, again. I’ve been away.
Galahs fret in the trees at creek edge,
ore train sighs through the membrane of sleep,
the bush is haunted by night.
Beyond our clearing carpeted by gravel,
we sought passage along lifelines of scars.
Our palms imprinted with spinifex spines,
how
can we know each other in the dark?
We plot courses with the tips of our fingers
across the contours of our bodies,
compasses confused by magnetic north,
we’ve no light to read our maps by.
Then, in the moment — the blink that passes
between one awakening and another —
constellations shift in the vault of Heaven:
satellites shed ballast, comets semaphore from the aether,
the firmament is spanned by a river of stars.
Pat Torres (b.1956)
Gurrwayi Gurrwayi, The Rain Bird
Gurrwayi Gurrwayi
It’s the Rain bird call,
Don’t hurt him or kill him,
Or the rain will always fall.
Gurrwayi Gurrwayi
Gawinaman jina gambini bandalmada.
Malu minabilga gamba bandalmada.
Galiya yiljalgun wula widu jayida.
Kim Scott (b.1957)
Kaya
Look. Listen. Or ‘Hark’ they said, in Darker
Days; paused and heard a distant crowd,
The sound of feet converging.
Come close: these marks you see;
This trace of sound, of voice and tongue,
These footprints of an echo trailing …
What abides in stone and earth,
May be buried in our hearing too.
Countless feet have formed this well trod path,
This sinew of a journey, this one sure way …
From far away and foreign places,
From close to home with open faces,
We bring our gifts of breath and song.
The river snaking slow beside;
The arching sky, ourselves beneath.
Though we reach for light and stars
Our fleshy souls they touch the earth
Again again again; a never-dying-fall.
Travelling, we are many peoples;
But our footprints make us one.
Voices grow like tongues of flame,
And in tongues of flame the fires come …
Applause it falls like heavy rain.
Our old people rise from graves of ash,
They delight again in contest
And in challenge.
Shoulder to shoulder we stand
The ancestors and us;
We stamp our feet,
We beat our palms,
We voice a sound that lives;
A crowd, reborn.
You are welcome on Whadjuk country.