Sunday 2 September 2018

Homecoming.

Homecoming.

We pause for a quiet moment 
beside the weatherboard house
that she lived in as a girl.
She carries a small plastic bag.
We walk beside a narrow path
and descend on steps cut into a steep bank.
Mum used to maintain these, she says.
They were only dirt then.

At the bottom is a stony beach
and the Derwent, hundreds of metres wide.
I built a little safe pool out of rocks for Susan here.
She loved it so much.
She always cried when we left.
Mum could hear us returning.

A brief, complex blend of emotions suddenly rush in,
joy and love, a sense of pride that I know her,
that I have lived my adult life with her,
but loss too, a regretful sense of passing time.
I see her as a girl, slender, dark haired, 
carrying her baby sister home
up the steep bank to their waiting mother,
or playing on these rocks, naming them,
laughing with childish delight,
plunging into the cold water.

She points to two of the larger rocks.
That one is Biggie. That’s Flattie.
She takes off her shoes, walks to Flattie, 
kneels, undoes the plastic bag 
and empties a little into the water.
The wind catches the finer particles.
She pauses then empties the rest.
A cloud appears in the water and briefly spreads.
The waves come in again, slap on the rock and suck back.
The cloud spreads a little more then it is gone. 
This great earth, giver and nurturer of life,
absorbs the remains of one 
who lived so passionately,
loved so fiercely, 
whose beauty was a light,
who was uncompromisingly upright,
who like all who tread the earth
had strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and losses
but who loved and was loved in return.
Earth and wind and water now have her. 
She is at one with countless billions
whose life has been given and taken back.

We hug briefly. No need for words.
We climb the earthen steps.
At the top blackberries grow wild.
They carry both flowers and fruit.
Most of the fruit is red but some are black.
We pick a few and taste them.
They’re still a bit bitter, she says,
as we turn and walk slowly away.

First published at Blue Heron Review

Beneath the Myth.

Beneath the Myth.

Because the colonizers                    broke our world

The  colonizer’s justification 
is neither veil nor deliberate lie.
It is the myth created so conquerers
can sleep easily in their beds.

So the Australian myth grew
of a primitive nomadic people 
neither owning land 
nor engaging in agriculture.

But sometimes truth will out.
Sometimes someone digs
far beneath the myth to find truths
both extraordinary and disturbing.

I read the work of one such person
recounting how the explorer, Charles Sturt, 
exhausted, near the end, laboured 
with his men over one last sandhill.

There they met a large party 
of indigenous people who,
though they had never seen pale skin,
well understood human need.

They cared for all his party,
gave them a newly built dwelling,
nursed them to health,
feeding them roast duck and cake.

Cake! That meant grain 
cultivated, harvested and ground,
bound with ingredients now lost.
“Sweetest cake I’ve eaten”, said one.

I read of another explorer,
the diarist, Thomas Mitchell,
passing through organised towns
of more than a thousand.

Storehouses were filled with grain.
Women ground flour and baked.
Crops were sown in dry creek beds,
their roots seeking the hidden water.

Now I, whose heritage 
is long centuries of warfare,
dispossession and accumulation,
well up with strangely sorrowing awe.

I hear that their greatest achievement 
was a co-operative system of government
and a respect for tribal boundaries
that extended across the continent.

What have we “civilised” societies lost? 
We confuse power with “civilisation”.
Guilt and fear find comfortable excuses
in prejoratives like “primitive”.

Now “civilised” problems mount.
The seas fill with islands of plastic.
The poles melt. Species die.
The deeply contemptible win high office.

Too late to learn something from them?
Or will individualism and greed 
continue to ride a runaway train 
headlong into the future’s oblivion?

First Published at Around the Fire 6 (Praxis)

Three Stories, Three Songs.

Three Stories, Three Songs.

I have travelled through stories.
In this half of the story 
the dead walk beside me.
I sense my mother’s whispers,
hear my grandfather’s songs,
touch an emu gouged in stone,
see ancient paintings in a cave,
feel primordial shapes labour from the sea.
Stars move inside me.
Earth is a pulse beneath my feet.
I own nothing, am part of everything.
To all that is, has been, will be, I sing
“Mother, sister, father, brother,
I am earth and to earth I belong.”

Because I have travelled through stories.
I know the other half, 
the one where I am trapped in dislocation,
where my tongue in confusion splits
and my tears drop on stone.
Alien gods close their ears.
My name is mocked. 
My warrior forebears are ridiculed.
The land does not love me.
It slaughters my brothers.
There are no lovers to take me
From the edge of brokenness.
My father’s ancient songs are lost.
Into the emptiness I sing
Am I nothing more than just 
another consequence of conquest?

Because I have travelled through stories
I dream of songs new and old
where a different sense of belonging 
is forged in anguish 
and tempered in compassion. 
It embraces place, history and culture,
rejoices in difference,
celebrates shared humanity,
touches, palm to palm,
weeps for another’s sorrow,
shares in another’s joy.
Listen. Can you hear the music?
Voices in sweet harmony 
sing of new belonging,
a transcendent humanity,
and the chorus is this-
beauty is not found in 
temples and shrines but in the 
home of sinful men like us.

First Published at Around the Fire 6 (Praxis)

Willi Wagtail

Willy Wagtail.

Light, agile, acrobatic,
she dances on the fence post,
her gown of black and white
as sleek and smooth
as unruffled satin,
though she owns no other 
and wears it day and night.

She fans her little tail.
Her flight is flits and spins,
short jaunts and instant turns,
out, up, down, around,
then back to dance again
on post or strand
of rusting, sagging wire.

Listen to her song.
Chick-a-chick-a-chick.
That is not complaint.
It is celebration.
Listen again.
Now she trills more musically, 
her chattering voice 
prettily rising and falling
as she pours out into the air only
pure, sweet, bright joy.

First published at Verse-Virtual

The Eagle.

The Eagle.

In high, wild wind 
I watch her ride corridors of air.
The wind is in her pinions,
in the effortless deftness
and minute calibrations
of her circling glide.
My blurred, distant world
is her sharp focus.
An easy surge corrects her path
and she veers rapidly away
on another current of air.

My voice is a thin whisper 
on the high mountainside.
“Queen of air, 
hollow-boned,
with dagger talons, 
scimitar beak,
gowned in barred brown
and robed in wings more glorious 
than garment of embroidered gold,
how you glide, dive and spiral
in majesty and mastery.
Fly close, fix on me
your clear and amber eye,
share with me,
you, who are so high and noble,
so fierce and wild,
so unshackled and free.”