Kaya
Noonook nitja Noongar maya waangkiny kaditj?
Noonook djen-ak maat-ak biirdi dalanginy,
Nitja demangka maya waangkiny
boya-k, boodjar-ak nyininy
Yoowarl koorl
Yoowarl koorl
Djena djen djen djen
Noonookat bardlanginy
Waadarn-ak, bilya-k, boodjar-ak.
Bardlanginy,
Ngalak boola boola moort.
Nitja maya waangkiny dalanginy,
Ngalak ken moort.
Yoowarl koorl,
Yoowarl koorl,
Djena djen djen djen …
Ali djinang:
bilya dabarkan Derbarl Yerrigan,
djindi worl-ak yirang,
boodjar ngadang ngalang djena.
Yoowarl koorl,
Yoowarl koorl,
Djena djen djen djen
Ngalak maya waangkiny
Koombar-abiny, yira koorliny.
Daaliny kaarl-ak ken-keniny,
Kaarl yoowarl koorl naariny.
Yoowarl koorl,
Yoowarl koorl,
Djena djen djen djen
Ngalang demangka ngoorndiny yoort-ak koora.
Yey, baalap yira koorl yak, nitja maya waangkiny
Dwongk-kaditjiny, nitja bakitj-wabiny djinanginy.
Ngalak mara baam,
Djen-ak boodjar baam,
Ngalak nitja maya waangkiny
Warangkiny, waalang-walanginy
Yoowarl koorl,
yoowarl koorl,
djena djen djen djen …
Yoowarl koorl ngalang
Kaya, noonookat wandjoo, wandjoo, nitja Whadjuk
boodjar. Ngalak kawiny, ngalang
koort djoorapin noonookat nitja maya waangkiny
kaditjiny.
Mar Bucknell (b.1957)
We Have Tried to Make Marks on the Glass
We have tried to make marks on the glass. Some have tried to scratch it till their nails bled. They imagined themselves as thorns. Some kicked and punched and slapped.
Some left handprints, or pushed their faces against the glass. Their sweat beaded on the surface.
One left the imprint of a forehead on the glass, in sweat.
Another left the trace of breath.
The next day, all the marks had gone. No matter how hard we tried, we could never leave a permanent mark.
Even blood left by smashing our faces against the glass, disappeared. The glass contains us, but we cannot mark it.
This is a fragment from the cycle The History of Glass, which was presented by Bright Edge Productions at The Blue Room Theatre in 2008 as part of the Silver Artrage 25th anniversary festival.
Roland Leach (b.1957)
Seven Miles to School
A photograph of my grandfather
with some of his sons
appeared in the local paper
after my uncle’s death
I can’t make out
if my grandfather is
smiling, staring or afraid
of the strange black box
but there is the famous
moustache and hat
as he holds his horse
with all four boys astride
pressed together on the same horse
their legs hanging like oars.
The caption reads:
… his four eldest sons
prepare to go to school
on the one horse
and after thirty years
of hearing my father
tell us of how they walked
seven miles to school every day
of the hot sand track
leaping from shade to shade
the tiger snakes in summer
and all this after milking cows at 4 am.
My father dismisses this and says
you can’t believe everything you read
then tells me again of the time
he was cornered by a bungarra in a cave.
Grandmother
I was too young to enjoy
my wayward grandmother
she was just the old lady
who arrived at midday
in a taxi
trundling down the drive
with her stringed boxes
full of cakes.
She had left my mother
in a home
when she was three
then turned up
a generation later
like the prodigal mother.
She was never forgiven though
and my mother would pack
her up on those evenings
even when she complained
till they fought of the past
and mother would fume
when she lit a cigarette
the smoke rising through her repeated perms.
I guess she wanted to be close
to whatever it was she lost
as the remains of her youth
hung in loose flesh
beneath the old dresses
and men no longer
hurried to her side
to buy her drinks
or take her to Ascot.
I found a postcard dated 1920:
it was from Aden
when she was young
and touring the world on her looks
defying her magistrate father
and uncle the archbishop.
By the time
I wanted to talk to her
of Aden & the war
of women & exile
of her family & mine
she was gone.
Marcella Polain (b.1958)
Zero Point Four
The nurse speaks, soft as any other mother.
The syringe is a canary of a thing.
She places it on the clean white table
as if she’d just wrung its neck.
I stare at it: zero point four mls and
yellow as piss.
You were cool and jagged,
a glacier of grace and madness.
How long will I reach to phone you?
I wake at night, stumble about, calling mumma
I stare at the nurse-face, the fierce haircut.
She calls me sweetheart, says just a little prick.
I want to quip but she’s heard it all.
So I turn to the wall and she
pops my skin like a plum.
You were a long, tough summer.
When you entered a room, you claimed it.
We never spoke about pills or needles
so I never said sharps can bounce off my skin, or
they blunt so quickly after just one use.
I report the side-effects and the specialist’s order:
Survive through this.
She offers me her soft-nurse face and
leaves the room.
So this is what life is: nausea, vertigo, migraine, cramps.
Obedience. Endurance.
Paul Hetherington (b.1958)
Meckering Earthquake
Eleven days before it happened
a policeman reported
that the ground was like jelly
and Mr Sudholz’s groceries left
the safe-keeping
of his tidy cupboard.
On the day itself
three dogs barked at nothing,
a murmur folded through the trees,
a brimming dam mounted its banks
and a table stamped on floorboards.
Ceilings spat puffs of plaster
and sheep in outlying paddocks
faced each other in groups.
As in a town meeting
a flock of swallows
walked round the Railway Hotel’s
upstairs verandah. Its easterly wall
careered into the street.
A shudder of light fell across wheatfields
as if hands skimmed t
he fat heads;
there was a rattle
like schoolgirls dragging
sticks along fence tops.
Mrs Nichol closed the general store,
dancing around the mouthing crevices
and, out of town, laterite pebbles
bounced like manic fleas.
A scarp rose from flat land,
crossing the highway.
Railway lines curled across their sleepers
like soft, loose spaghetti.
An empty farmhouse shivered
and sat down.
Michael Heald (b.1959)
Pear Tree
Because I’ve been learning how to hold
my child — adjusting as he changes
weight and shape — I remember
the pear tree I used to climb
and stay in: the way it held me,
one branch under my legs and one
across my back, never quite secure,
the sloping cylindrical limbs, as I
looked along them, alien
to the whole idea of holding:
it was I who had to fork and cling
and stretch for the freckled pears,
themselves ill-fitted to the hand,
ballooning heaviness wanting to drop.
Leeches
i
You’re from Tasmania, worked
in the bush there: once had to go
through a gully where the tiger snakes struck in volleys, butting your gumboots.
And you’ve known their cousin, the tiger leech,
been nudged and burrowed into
by its fat vitality. And then there are
Bill Mollison’s stories: the dog tied up overnight
outside the salt circle, in the morning
just a lump of bloated leeches; the man
who couldn’t urinate, refusing the cut,
on the brink of self-poisoning.
ii
If I find one on my arm my mind
heats up, knowing there are now
the serious places to search, where more
than just clothing has to be drawn back.
Once, at the lake, your son
came out of the water complaining
of a sore eye: ‘it feels like a leech
is in there.’ We greeted him
with disbelief, but turning
the lid inside out, there it was,
snuggled into the raw skin,
and when you flicked it out,
a sheet of blood was flung.
iii
To me, their oozing, concertinaring along
is the bizarre gait of nature
going for our most succulent parts, and
since we’re the chief cloggers and foulers,
the painstaking, heroic march
of her army of tiny pipes
aiming to drain us off.
Maree Dawes (b.1960)
Gesso
I grow babies
rounded breasts and belly
then tiredness and illness
make me thin
he says, any girl of eighteen
is more beautiful than you
I watch him take my body apart
mismatch colours
twist expressions
limbs and organs
he offers me to the Minotaur.
Frieda Hughes (b.1960)
Wooroloo
Wild oats pale as peroxide lie down among
The bottlebrushes; a beaten army, bleaching,
Life bled into the earth already and seeds awaiting;
Stiff little spiked children wanting water.
Above the creek that split apart the earth
With drunken gait and crooked pathway,
Kookaburras sit in eucalyptus. Squat and sharp-throated
They haggle maggots and branches from ring-neck parrots.
I have watched the green flourish twice, and die,
And the marsh dry. In this valley I have been hollowed out
And mended. I echo in my own emptiness like a tongue
In a bird’s beak. My words are all gone.
Out of my mouth comes this dumb kookaburra laugh.
How my feathers itch.
Kate Lilley (b.1960)
South Perth Poems
Rhapsody
The past is awake and stirring
in a black shirred bikini
blinding in a psychedelic shift
like the picture of a mansion
I’ll give you the benefit and take it back
like the yellow scarf I knitted and unknitted
the fleshy cactus roses
I grew the year I adored you
1972
After the dance we cross the oval in pairs
to the steep bank behind the softball field.
The hall is bolted shut, teachers pass in the dark,
smoking and talking on the way to their cars.
It’s cold on the ground, my buttons loose to the sky.
Sequel
Author v title in the sunken lounge
‘abortion’ in the index
whose life am I living?
the blister platform is empty and so am I
rippled veneer
feast and famine
a bracelet of lost charms
the blonde gleam of moonlight like a slide projector
When it comes to period pieces
genres get distressed
and then everybody’s anxious
Graham Kershaw (b.1961)
The Heywood Spire
Below Howarth Cross, tussocky fields
still wait for dead builders; ‘Pick your plot now.’
Mice dart away through clover and thistles
dodging oil drums, chip wrappers, surprised
by the impossible song of lost looms.
Under Cobbled Bridge, off Belfield Lane
the stones erode along their grain, as lain.
On the underside, immortalised, ‘Kipper Lips’
and ‘Tina too much too young.’
Past cyclists, fisherman and fern-clad locks
two men on a scaffold are bricking-up
the last of nine great eyeless mills.
The sun-stone rolls over Blackstone Edge,
heavy, heavy. On Smalley Street, each drainage
grate is still in place. Doris hasn’t moved
the old meat slicer, yet doesn’t even know
me, as she squints over change, saying,
‘You’re better off than you realised, love.’
From the church, scrawled on the garage
my brothers’ names, then the gentle rise
of Heywood Road dipping and winding
narrowly between dark hawthorn trees,
cobbled patches still breaking through,
hints at something we called ‘country’
heading out one Sunday morning
blindfold toward the Heywood spire
with no thought of returning.
Afeif Ismail (b.1962)
The Empire of My Grandmother
transcreated with Vivienne Glance
The courtyard of our house
is my Grandmother’s empire.
At the end of her dawn prayers
I am awoken by her devout humming —
appeals for good fortune for us all
and never asking anything for herself.
Is it selflessness?!
Or perhaps she needs nothing from God?!
I follow her jangling anklets
holding the hem of her dress.
The croon of her songs
irrigates mint and rocket in garden beds
more than the water sprinkling from her hands.
She gives me seeds
to feed her doves which fly around us —
we look like tourists in Piccadilly Square.
In another corner
her goat’s pen bestows the wh
ite courtyard
with the whiff of ammonia
and goat’s droppings;
She bends her neck under her pied goat
closes her eyes and squirts milk into her mouth
calling me to do like her;
I run away.
She calls again;
I hand her the milk pot.
At the same time she calls to my mother
to watch for sparks from the fire.
Suddenly she asks me
— How old are you?
— Six years.
— Then come here
squat down and hold the goat’s back leg
between your calf and thigh.
Hold with all your might so she won’t escape
from you.
Hold tighter.
Hold tighter.
Hold tighter.
Are you not a man?!
Hold tighter.
Hold tighter.
Now recite,
‘In the name of God, the Beneficent, the
Merciful,’
then squeeze the udder gently
with your right hand
And hold the pot with your other hand;
In such a way
I became her assistant in these morning affairs.
At noon
the place fills with the odour of wet river sand
and musk
and ginger
and last night’s scandals from the Perpetual
Congress of her gossiping neighbours;
She pounds Ethiopian coffee beans
cups of her deliciously scented coffee circulate;
her neighbours long for her to read the future
from their palms.
She smears the neck of my youngest sister
with salted sorghum paste
as a remedy for mumps.
A scream breaks
through the skin of the Earth’s atmosphere
as she weaves straw around a neighbouring
child’s broken finger.
She gives to the one who wants a husband
a colourful bead and special incense.
To the one who wants a child
a fragrant oil and advising whispers,
to the one who has a chronic headache
she lays her hands on her temples
then with her experienced, fluent fingers,
massages her shoulder
the back of her neck,
her scalp,
and with compassion and rigid strokes,
her forehead
then she covers this neighbour’s face
with a faded handkerchief
and pulls from between her eyes;
A snap is heard! And a deep sigh.
Her neighbour shouts