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TO SUE
Your high-standing, high-flying carriage, Flossie,
hurries us home.
She freewheels over sly shadows
from the coast road's hem of sun-heavy trees,
past farms, open surf, resort villges, beach townships,
to the hustle of highrise.
We leave five weeks of poetry workshop.
From its porcelain bowl rings words of opinion.
They flow into other thought, soft and sharp-angled,
and competing with Flossie’s brash breath.
I lean to hear from the back seat.
Closure sharpens our wits,
and Sue, you strip us with questions,
one, our choice between living coastal or hinterland.
As quick as Flossie’s feet I answer ‘hinterland’,
and surprised, you and Di ask why.
The sea lives near me and maybe you see me a sea-aunt,
bringing company and presents
to sea-family members,
bonded for always, like wave to wave, tide to sand,
approaching with grains of sand on my toes,
arms swinging my stiffness,
unbalancing my backpack of behavioural conformity,
untying their straps that bind me to these older years,
loosening them into kites, their strings for seagulls to
thread through the skies,
yet, still reaching for achievement from the mix
of the ocean’s and my emotional chaos,
the rise and fall of our healthy chests on the same salt air,
us both strong-bodied,
strong-willed challengers of our own survivals,
and on still mornings, lift from the sea’s new page,
glittering words, painted with the sun’s new paintbrush,
from its new palette,
and write them into my heart,
or see me the sea-mother, who with leaves of seagrass,
knitted my children into my body,
nourished them from the ocean’s pantry until they left me
for the world,
the seagrass drying inside me to brown sticks,
fracturing more each year,
mourning for them, and for my babies tossed at birth by the sea
that disowned them and flung their toys to rock in the sea’s throat,
unpicked and discarded by the tweezers of birds,
or my mourning for babies I never conceived,
to grow and cherish me over their years,
or my mourning the empty spaces of my life I never knew how to fill,
or the sea-mother choking regret, leaning to capture new breath
from the open mouths of sea creatures,
singing their music, writing their poems,
my arms extended, fingers running, spreading down
through the sea’s glass bowl,
touching the furtive flesh of fish,
translating their luminous colours into a subtlety of poems,
and plundering the sea’s deepest weeds
to retrieve the words I once wrote of sorrow,
their flesh shredded,
waves whispering over their bones that confront
in scoured severity, refusing to perish.
The sea grows more, not less.
It doesn’t care how much the rain smacks it,
lightning thrashes it,
the sun burns it, how high it floods.
It never fevers………….
But…… I cannot live without earth on my shoes,
watching sunlight resting on tree leaves,
the chests of hills trembling with nature’s milk,
their bellies heavy with growing fruit,
their shadowed valleys holding secrets under damp blankets,
and mine, and the river pool eye,
staring back its shaded isolation,
its cheeks, winged with black mascara,
its green eye-shadow rimmed in moss.
Without these, the demanding underside of my emotions
would consume me into suicidal despair.
And so I chose the hinterland.
Here I can stretch my arms and reach for sky
with the thin-legged, thin-armed trees, their modest flutter of leaves,
their curled toes pressing surface soil,
and trees big legged, big-armed, waving leaves of supremacy,
toes penetrating deep.
I can grow new leaves of learning by listening to their secrets,
storing inside me the smells of rock, clay, eucalyptus.
The hinterland laughs in the sunshine and I laugh with it.
It smiles after rain and I smile with it.
It hurts when it burns and I share in its hurt.
It weeps when it floods and I weep with it.
I can spread my aloneness over its morning warmth,
its big, breathing body, and listen to its heartbeat,
the knuckles of its bones buried deep in flesh
that never complains,
watching the shadows in its hollows
slowly blinking, slowly relinquishing their sanctuary of sleep;
the open-hearted Queensland hinterland, haven to gentle creatures,
where man strikes it with matches and it answers with new growth,
where he can stand disentangled from the fibres of commerce,
where creek waters pause and ponder,
and hurry wondering where they go,
what they will find.
They shout fearful as they plunge down rock edges,
past rock sheets,
or advise in monotone that their stretch of moist silk
offers refreshment to all,
where maybe a river, heavy with ego and generosity,
takes all it owns to throw to the sea,
the hinterland, where the wind cajoles or rebukes me,
sweeping my face with the language of forest,
the language of city resonating against the clavicles of highrise.
Caroline Glen Nov. 2008 ©
BY THE BRISBANE RIVER
I
Sometimes we need no words,
only our thoughts,
and just us two, quiet by the river.
Older now, we sit on a bench and watch
our reflections quiver formless in the water,
reminding us of the insignificance
of many past anxieties.
Fat and confident the Cats hurry past.
We have no hurry.
From her invisible rope that will not break
the moon tells us we will live
to praise it tomorrow.
The glass buildings across the river,
alight with power,
speak of technology we will never know.
We hold hands,
the strength between them
our compensation.
II
There is no blue to our river.
The sky claimed it in jealousy
when the river, after freedom
from fire and rock, showed her new blue dress
to the universe, and demanded sky,
and all her relatives, admire her.
The sky will not compromise.
She holds our river brown,
protests brown skin stays brown.
Maybe, superficial the sky.
We stretch to it, beseech fulfilment
of our desires. It folds them into its clouds.
Maybe, too selfish, the river.
We bend to it for answers
to our deepest thoughts.
We fear it drowns them, rubs them in its mud.
Do we trust sky or river?
III
From a parapet of concrete
Alice enters another Wonderland.
Long ago Rabbit and the Mad Hatter
disappeared into the long grasses.
In blue flaring dress, white pinafore,
brown swinging hair, black-strapped shoes,
she stretches her arms to the sky.
From its indigo ink,
on fingers shimmering silver from starlight,
she scrawls ALICE between two stars.
The river dances sapphires and diamonds
gifted by the moon.
It mirrors the palaces of glass
beyond the riverbank,
lit every evening for passionate performances.
Everyone remembers the words.
Caroline Glen Nov. 2008 ©
ODE TO A PROFILE OF GRASS
I have found you again,
on the hem of town, breathing your own
piece of air and sky, licking the sun, singing with the wind.
You stand ankle-high, each blade hard-pressed
into the sum of you,
still living your freedom.
You still spread from road to horizon,
a large green garment,
a little worn near the sleeves,
where new threads, alone or in clusters,
patch the best they can.
Earth has provided the cutting-floor for design,
the workplace for patterning,
the malleability for needling,
the timeplace for admiration.
You are seeded to earth-dependency, like us,
where the seeds of man ripen,
where his body heats into shape,
his bones harden for action,
his soul reaches for sky.
Your two seams run straight at your sides,
by taffeta-stiff houses,
their manicured lawns, manicured flowers,
all yawning with boredom.
The winds pleat and crease,
ruffle you into ecstasy, smooth you into quietude.
I came again to see the embroidery of your small flowers,
white for the moon, gold for the sun,
swaying their fragility amongst the dark-green confidence
of weeds, and to watch the small brown creatures
journeying your roots, all they know of home,
and to look up for butterflies, moths and birds,
seesawing their joy about and above you;
and to honour the birdsnests inside your pockets
and cuffs;
woven from your cloth,
and safe from hooves of horses and cattle.
I have come for you to renourish me,
to slice open the fruit of my imaginings,
dulled and pitted by city living.
The branches of your old trees ride the winds
wider, higher.
Ungroomed, unshaven, left to their own fancy,
they drift their pose in lazy height,
and droop in prayer, in praise of you,
spilling their buds and leaves in random thanks at your feet.
Your shrubs still crouch low, their brown fingers
stiff and knuckled.
Fistfuls of tussock still cling to your fabric.
I have come to lie on you,
to listen to your stories, hear the hustle of insects,
the rustle of birds, the whistle and chuckle of wind,
the rise and fall of their tunes,
to hear you growing, slowly, slowly.
And to smell your green flesh, its salty-sweetness,
like the salty-sweetness of our blood,
and smell the bitter friendliness from your ferns,
like old coal, resting in a shed of forgetfulness;
and smell ash and sweat from your native shrubs,
and stroke a rogue thread bending above,
arguing for more sun.
And to smell the earth, its minerals and clay,
once water and fire that long ago haemorrhaged
in fierce unison to mould you.
And to reflect one day spadefuls may be mounded
above me, ironing me to anonymity,
my last covering blanket.
In vain we wish to keep you, your gown
wide and generous, swinging, beckoning us without guile
or anger, to love you, to heal with you.
Buildings, factories, creep closer. I cannot stop them.
We cannot stop them. You cannot withstand
man’s machines, his madness for money.
No-one can help. Not me, nor the people,
the insects, the birds, the flowers.
You are destined to die for the world, spooned up
and overwritten by concrete,
despaired for a while, then soon forgotten.
Caroline Glen © 2008
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