Nine Sixteen
Blood exploded from the Twin Towers' severed heads.
Neck veins puckered and shrank.
Down, down in flesh and blood, the necks collapsed
into their huge chests.
Latticed, struggling for life, the chests heaved
until they emptied last breaths.
Along arteries of stairway, the running, burning, screaming bodies
ignited flames of sex……
Five days after, we fled our Manhattan apartments.
By car, by train, we kept appointments with the Midtown Hotel.
We crowded in elevators, pressed security buttons
and swept into the One Leg Up Club to the smiles
of hostess, Palagia. We had pleaded:
'Don't cancel. We need you; need to party
like never before.'
We hung our coats. We merged with the lap dancers and strippers,
absorbing the tension between the dream and nightmare,
nightmare and dream.
In feathers and silk, in masks and sashes,
we swung and danced, though we hardly knew.
The spaces between steps became words we would not speak.
We renewed each breath with hope for the maimed.
We rested our breath for the dying and dead.
Dust, like ghosts, swirled around the windows.
We smelt their smouldering rags.
Stranger to stranger, friend to friend, we touched, caressed.
Time folded into the curtains.
We folded into each other and loved
as though we never had, or ever could, again.
Love became the pinnacle of need, sex the pathway.
Sex spun from our hair, our bodies, our mouths.
We coupled in the bath, in the shower, on the floor.
Babies, poems and songs were conceived;
our mortalities before us like bowls of over-ripe fruit,
to eat. We closed our ears to the hoses
shouting water, the screams from the trapped.
We exposed our bodies like our country;
our America, exposed and bleeding,
our mother, her betrayal unimagined.
First Prize Free Verse Sunshine Coast Writers' Group competition 2007
Mahogany Furniture
I grew surrounded by its limbs of authority.
It humbled me, taught me respect.
Later, adolescent, I left it for bare rooms
honeycombed inside a city's friendlessness.
Mahogany belonged behind me.
But held me when people shook and trembled
the threads of my mind's web
that spread lonely over my life.
The graciousness it breathed through its rooms
helped steady the fears that often spun
my blood.
Its bookcase kept Shakespeare and Keats
in my head.
My feet, weary from walking the streets for work,
remembered they once trod soundless
on the red carpet that bonded its tables,
padded chairs, escritoire, sideboard.
In those rooms the straight, dark wood
slept in soundless songs of contentment.
Its weight carried integrity.
Its carvings postured middle-class manners.
Its veneer shone stars of optimism.
The dining table, cornered, uncluttered,
spoke of long friendships.
The six-year-old sat at the mahogany piano.
At her shoulder mother, learning again,
leaned to study the sheet
where bold crotchets and quavers
demanded another hour's practice tomorrow.
Trees have always grown inside me.
First prize Open Poetry Kingaroy Eisteddfod 2007
Champagne
In formless vigilance I watch and wait.
You stand on the balcony and smile.
You hold glasses of champagne
that wink in the melting sunlight.
Autumn winds flick old leaves of regret
around the concrete corners,
chased by the new.
You have just married at the Registry
without friends, without photos,
my uncle the only guest.
You, Mum, dark-haired,
in your pink and grey spotted dress,
you Dad, fair-haired, in your grey trousers
and blue jacket are young and good-looking.
But, I want to cry out that you are naive.
You are friends who have made a mistake.
Loneliness and crumpled dreams
have ripped you of reason.
You think you are happy,
that happiness will negotiate a path for you.
It won't.
You will stumble over many speed bumps
of despair and eggshells of frustrations
lie scattered at your feet.
You have no careers. You are educated
but poor and poverty will break you.
You feel safe today.
A family will make you safer
so you wait for me and I wait for you.
I will be the most of your unlived passion.
You will love me
and we will be family until I am three.
Unwarned the hangman's rope will fall.
Mum, you will take me with you into
different lonelinesses.
You will learn fears you can't imagine.
Dad, you will begin again with another mother -
with a home. She will give you a daughter.
You will die at forty-seven.
I will grow through boyhood like a reed
in the pond's dark centre, safe and sighing.
Then drugs, borne rhythmically on inflexible winds
will rest on the leaves of my brain.
I will bend and swing with them for many years.
I will seldom bend and swing for you.
I will fight back for my health
but my body will grieve.
With grey in my hair I will still play with my days;
no wedding, no family, no champagne
Time
It is time to return to the starched grass, the
flat, reclusive land that lies like an old woman
still spreading her legs to her dryness inside,
asking for moisture and love; the land where
winds grow instead of computers; where roads
yawn with boredom to the next pub. It is time
to burn in air where the dust-powdered leaves
of trees wait for Heaven to wash them, wipe
their throats, so they sing again. We will drive
with the loneliness hanging like faded washing
along miles of telegraph lines; where crows
and kookaburras sit wondering where to go,
their throats hushed. We will drive through
cushions of saltbush, hungering, sighing to
themselves in a quiet madness for survival
And salute the eucalypts, scattered like weary
soldiers pinned to their duties, loyal until
mother in kindness, loosens forever their
threads of strength. And see, far away, a
creek's open wardrobe of trees, its screen
of green clothes. Then stop and step between
to kneel and flush our lips, tongues, bellies
with the taste of leaf, stone, moss as the
memory-heavy water slides past our eyes
to nudge the moss, drown the leaves, tease
the stones. We will scoop water to a new,
silver billy and heat leaves of tea over the
broken limbs of she-oaks and melaleuca.
We will wait and rest as the haughty sun
blasts the bellies of fellow stones to spin
quick, golden threads, pure as new happiness.
We will listen to the creek's constrained
symphonies pulsing down its long, unheralded
journey. We will take blankets from the car,
lay them on shadowing grass, then seep our
bodies and minds in the water's silk. We will
sing as food cooks on easy flames; eat and
talk until our voices, heavy with tiredness,
rest inside the listening stones. We will
picture the stockman riding home, the bowed
horse's head. And listen to stories collected
by the trees, their eyes watching, as we
stretch to sleep with sky in our eyes
and the stars jeweled around our fingers
Claire Seafield
She taught us English;
sailed all those waves from England to New Zealand
to teach us young blue-uniformed,
brown-stockinged girls.
She didn't shout or demand attention.
She believed in the dignity of language.
Tallish, fiftyish, she wore dresses to her calves.
They swung as she hurried, books under one arm.
Her body was curved, her face dreamy
with a half-smile, head to one side.
From some British dialect she sang her lessons
like the wind on the sea moving.
Her seagulls eyes, blue, white-rimmed, flickered
as she spoke, holding ours for a second
then hurrying over.
When she looked past the small rows
of daygirls, boarders, from unknown places,
to the brick classroom wall,
I wonder if she saw the brick home of her childhood,
smelt kippers in the kitchen.
I liked watching her at the blackboard. She moved
like the ocean,
her face a changing of tides, covering currents
of shyness.
I think I listened to her lessons,
and must have learnt something
from the year's instruction.
The term after Christmas she was not there.
'Nervous breakdown' someone muttered.
Feet planted, speechless, I felt a little responsible
and wished I could have helped her,
somehow made her happier.
I learned she became a high-country governess,
and wondered if she would rather have sailed back
over all those waves to be with the children
of oaks and elms.
I saw her staring at sheep on those desolate hills
and wrote to her saying I was sad she left,
and was sorry if my high spirits had contributed
to her illness.
I never heard from her,
never saw her again.
|
