Category: poetry

Rain-song for rogue women

Inspired by violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja

I think I might love rogue women who hold their music

under their chins,

the first symphony she heard was rain falling on her Moldovan or was it Austrian roof

and she was only four and maybe it was this same rain that gave her permission to walk barefoot

on a concert hall stage and play Tchaikovsky with a rainbow flag on her shoulder rest

and today I am listening to the rain-song, and

though we may be underwater soon,

I have lived so long on parched land that

I ask to be swept beneath the current

shocked, surprised.

and yes, yes ‘Surprise me….

if art ceases to surprise it becomes a dead museum.’*

*Patricia’s Kopatchinskaja’s response to a critique of her interpretation of Ravel’s Tzigane.  

Things I learned from you

That nature is comprised of fractals, a golden ratio seen in a sunflower’s face and a fern unfurling, that a wave’s crest can be reduced to the rise and fall of sine and cosine, of trigonometry in motion,

That nature smiles when you plant kamote leaves, that she blesses you with rain and sweet potato tubers, that there are spirits in the trees and that the ground upon which we tread is alive

That some earth needs to be softened in order for plants to grow and indeed you sprouted forests from clay and hoof torn dirt and I learned that some people are better teachers than parents,

And I learned that the same person who can birth foliage from barren earth, command an oasis with toil and care, delighting in palms that reach to the sky

May not delight in their own offspring’s unfolding, that they will plant them in darkness, abandon them in barren land and blame them

For their leafless stems and flowerless bloom

I learned that you should have been a botanist and not a mother.

The Flood

Sing, madwoman, as the spring harvest

floats down the swollen river and the

saturated soil rejects the falling sky

Sing as adult children carry the sun

beneath their shivering skins

searching for a stolen summer

Sing, madwoman for you built your ark long ago

when you sank in human deluge

and the sadness could not hold

You, madwoman, who built your ark with

broken stories, hull hammered with upturned words,

pulling fallen folk aboard

Cry if you must for this sinking world

but also sing, for you have always floated

while the strongmen have drowned.

Things they taught me in Catholic school/transferable skills

Things they taught me in Catholic school:
How to genuflect
How to raise my cupped hands to receive
Christ’s wafer flesh on my tongue
In a way that didn’t leave pieces of 
Jesus between my teeth.
All the saints, all the holiness outsourced
In the first gig economy &
Sin.
	Girls if you have the urge to sin
Plant flowers in your garden.
	I’ve always had beautiful roses.

Things they taught me in Catholic school:
Transferable skills
Stolen from pagan lore and worship
Through the senses
Brass incense holder and sandalwood
Forest green or deep purple (the colour of sin) 
Draped across the altar, 
Woven gold vestments and
Votive candles.

And now my ritual. Each day of worship 
Beneath the Banyan, where the Asian spirits live
With the magpies and lorikeets
And here I stand
In prayer to protect 
Her buttress roots from plastic beside
The ancient Gadigal river. 
An act of devotion. 
I pray to her canopy, and she answers with peace
And I listen, 
I listen.
Good Catholic girl that I am.

After the rain

So, I am wading through a La Nina springtime,

past the mangroves bathing in a swollen river

through sodden fields where puddles have turned to

 pools to reflect

the dusk light sky and grey-pink clouds.

After the rain

I am wading through floodwater

praying for an end to a muscular mind

tightened into

a fist of fury.

All around me, all types of post rain birdsong.

But I listen for the kookaburras, their unhinged cackle calls

like maniacal laughter, and I begin to

Unfurl.

                    

What she lets you see

You, with your celluloid eyes and certainty,

you will only see the dollar store fairy lights

wrapped as noose around her neck,

and think softness means stupidity

and you will only see a heart on sleeve

but never see its plastic casing, the lithium

batteries and metronomic tick.

and you will never see beyond

her curated life, the witchcraft:

Behind that manicured maiden face

she has the wisdom of a crone.

Just letting you know; I’ve been watering your garden.

Just so you know, I’ve been watering your plants all winter. You remember, those plants that you plucked feverishly from Bunnings clearance trays, the seedlings we pilfered from torn plastic planters piled outside for Council pickup,

            remember

before you crept inside your mind and made a nest with your demons.

I’ve been watering your ferns, your monsteras, your Tahitian bridal ivy, your ornamental orange tree that flowers but never bears fruit, and I’ve been watering as an act of ritual,

and what else is such a ritual but

an act of love and

 perhaps an act of resistance?

through that confusing damp, wet, winter where the black mould crept along our concrete walls and the tomato plants flooded despite their adequate drainage,

I watered,

crooked stalks that looked like dandelions but weren’t and plants that were possibly invasive species

or simply just weeds.

Even while you swaddled yourself with weed and booze and spent your days scrolling through doom-scapes [and yes, they would call this enabling]

[the AA, the co-dependency experts]

I’ve been watering your plants

 as ritual,

                                                                        as rebellion,

but I thought you should know about those plants we rescued, the ones wrapped in black plastic with flat angular leaves, the ones we rescued on a hopeful night-

Those plants are blooming.

I think they’re irises.

If I stare at them long enough, they look like silken lilac and gold origami cranes,

gazing up at the lightening sky.

Steal time. A letter to my fellow creatives

To my fellow artists, writers, and creatives, I implore you:

that this is what we must do, so as not to die while our hearts are still pulsing and our breath still escapes our mouths in laboured gasps disguised as whispers,

this is what we must do:

steal time.

Yes, this is a particular type of thievery, but in this world, what other choice do we have?

Steal time from whomever demands your lifeforce at minimum wage, from whomever leaves you feeling more machine than organism, from whomever leaves you trudging rather than dancing.

Steal time because the moment we are born into adulthood, time is stolen from us,

and you can always earn money, shag someone on Tinder, binge-watch that Netflix series. There will always be more groceries to bag, or data to input or reports to write.

Time is the most precious natural commodity there is and if they could, they’d float in on the stock exchange like water, or power or other things that should never be

monetised.

I implore you, this is not merely a moral imperative, it is an act of resistance, to…

steal time from your employer, who won’t give you sick pay, won’t give you time off with a dying loved one, who won’t pay you what you’re worth

because it offends their sensibilities, their new religion, their worship of the bottom line.

And this is how you steal time, call it what you like, quiet quitting or just retrieving your humanity from a machine that assigns you a number that’s not a unique datapoint:

write stories in your lunchbreak, compose symphonies in endless meetings, imagine landscapes during the back-to-back shifts you’ve been asked to work,

write on the backs of report templates, on the backs of invoices, on the front of student exam papers, reclaim what it is that makes you human,

resist because the world needs your light,

 more than it needs company men and women, marketing gurus and hedge-fund managers, more than it needs people who only see living beings

as resources to exploit.

load bearing soul

a letter to my mother

Still, still I am a load bearing soul, 
So, I will carry your wound sack  
across my shoulders
chisel space in my skull
for your sadness 
and if this isn’t enough, mum 
I’ll keep trying, I’ll sell
my spleen, a kidney, a lung-
so, your suffering can live
comfortably inside me, 
I will weigh my flesh and give 
you a kilo (2.2 pounds) the
metric system balances the pain 
			
Even then you will say that 
I don’t deserve the springtime, 
though my soul has buckled
and my skin sack is empty
my kilogram of flesh 
bloody on your scales,
I mustn’t laugh at the diving swallows
mustn’t inhale the lustful jasmine or 
finger magnolia flesh turning to leaf.
	It’s not enough to bear your load.
	It’s only fair that I suffer as you have
	and there’s logic in your metrics
	but what mother loves her child with kitchen scales?
	what mother calls this love
	at all.

Springtime in D Minor

As all the northern poets pin fall to page, 
you are playing with colour again. Your client
squirts gold onto butcher’s paper like Jackson Pollock 
and the wisteria tresses dangle from rotten 
fence palings and timber eaves. You too 
like to flirt with refraction smearing 
rainbow across your eyes, while the
wattle shakes her ringlets across the motorways. 

His father posts online. Four years since
L’s death date, but he never noticed springtime 
when there was a goon bag behind the Ajax
and Smirnoff behind the curdled milk. You are done 
with half formed motherless men grasping 
at shadows and fainting in the sun so
you ignore the hashtag and make 
vases out of cleanskins,
slipping lavender into wine bottles,
twisting scent into song.