Category: poetry

Lightnoise

Sydney is obsessed with illumination. Fireworks when smoke encircles the city, old growth forest turning to charcoal. Light that dances on still winter buildings. Air that burns in the chill.

After the plague, people slide from beneath their doonas, step away from their streaming subscriptions and wade through the throng of crying infants and their parents, who are also crying. Inwardly.

After the plague they stand in the winter winds to watch colour move.

How many migrating moths fall to the ash covered pavements, seized by their own epilepsy, their inner compass broken?

That’s Sydney.

After the plague.

How contagious its lights, its movement-

frenetic,

garish,

intrusive.

After the plague we must keep moving, even if the sound of light invades the silence and

Give me stillness.

Let the sky breathe.

Leave the architecture be, let the buildings slump into night’s cocoon.

Let it be.

One woman

And now, I think I can play in 6/8 slip jig time, though my bow slides out of its third lane and is maybe a bit too scratchy for classical, but might fit in, for folk, for trad music-

there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune, the story is as much technique as the ornamentation, the slides, the rolls, the double stops-

I can almost play a double stop now, so it sounds like two violins are playing simultaneously

when really it is just me, one violin.

One woman.

You always said I was magic, a witch.

This wasn’t an insult, you said.

So, there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune and I can do that. I can tell stories. Of how I started playing beneath the paper barks, under magpies and currawongs, listened to music from the West Coast of Ireland, Counties Clare, and Sligo, and no I won’t forget Donegal where the fair folk still emerge in the gloaming-I can tell you that I listen over and over until the music merges with my bones and I feel a rhythm moving through me, and the rhythm,

the rhythm,

brings stories and though I live on stolen land-

I can tell new stories.

I can do all this.

You said I was a witch.

It wasn’t an insult, but maybe a warning?

I am one woman, with rhythm moving through her.

Then you don’t know me

Then you don’t know me.

You don’t know how much of this life I’ve walked alone, that I’ve had to be my own lighthouse, and if this is what scares you, well…

Maybe you’ll learn.

You’ll learn brick by brick, with spirit level, mortar, and grout. Eventually you’ll gauge the right elevation, where to cast your lamp and from which headland. You’ll learn to pick from the dashed bodies of your broken self, you’ll learn which cargo can be salvaged and what must be discarded.

You’ll learn that so much of your self is simply this:

Detritus.

Or you won’t learn. That’s ok too.

But I have no time for the blind, the easily seduced, searching for siren’s lights.

Lost in a shipwreck of their own making.

Sacrifice

What does she want but to charm
the swallows and make the trees dance,
Almost Orpheus, but a woman
with an instrument,
not from heaven, but Hades.

A sacrifice is needed.
Take them. An ovary and an eye, she whispers,
Let me hang beneath the banyan tree
Almost Odin, but a woman,
I am used to hanging
I am used to bleeding, she says.

But first suspend her from that leafless tree, 
With grandfather’s beard draped upon 
Its branches, like chain mail of fallen soldiers
Where currawongs perch, crow-like but flightless
Dismember me, she says.
I am used to it.
In time, I will reassemble.

If you stay too long in the sea (poem in progress)

If you stay too long in the sea
The mermaids will take you, her cousin said,
a bored babysitter, fourteen.
Reluctantly, she exited, four and in love
with wave texture, 
sand texture
in love with all that
reliably rose and fell -

If you walk on the cliff rocks alone
The men will take you, her mother said. 
Instead, she brought a kitchen knife
and clambered along capricious cliffs
Seventeen, in love with all that was
Predictably harsh, in love with a
A cadence of crest and crash.

If you bring a towel, 
We’ll be more comfortable, the boy said.
Twenty-one and agreeable, 
She lay in the private cove 
Hidden but exposed.
Twenty-one and watching beyond him
Wanting the salt on her skin
Her body submerged
As the shallows caressed her. 

If she leaves now, she thinks,
She will arrive before the families 
Thirty nine and sensible she arrives at dawn
Seeking solace, she wades into the rock pools
A hermit crab peers from its jagged crevice,
Watching, not judging
as she floats on her back
as the rising sky blinds her
and the ocean holds her.

Protection song (a poem in progress)

I am still working on this, but wanted to share the first verse.

The violin is what you play 
when you can’t sing.
Red backed fairy wrens 
know their mother’s song
before they hatch 
to protect themselves from
birds of prey. 
The violin is what you play
when your mother didn’t have a song for you,
but you’d like to find your own 
Protection song.

voiceless speech

The craft is a challenge,
but those who severed her tongue
left her hands intact;
in time her fingers self-cripple with
bow,
brush, 
needle,
nib.

“Talk why don’t you just talk!”
they scream with impatient tongues 
that pummel like fists.
Silent, she turns away.
A conversation is not a competition.
and she is battle sick.

Dexterous and nimble,
this is how she speaks:
stitched ciphers and threaded testimony
type,
tone, 
texture,
tension. 
There are many ways to whisper-
this happened and I exist.

The Wayfarer

Soul weary. She feels it all.
beneath her worn sneakers and too high arches, 
a quickening. The earth’s arrhythmic pulse. 
They who follow her shallow footprints
gouge their own eyes and 
plead congenital blindness.
Along the cobbled path,
she becomes reluctant mother
to adult children.

Soul weary. No annual or 
compassionate leave to grieve
ecological collapse, her country a crematorium for
marsupials and monotremes she never knew,
folding into burned scrub, while birds fall
featherless into a reverse phoenix fire,
each species’ death
a faded footnote 
of Anthropocene history.

Soul weary. They call her way-shower instead 
Of wayfarer, 
But they’ve always pronounced
her name wrong, those who plug
their ears and cry deafness.
those who follow but forget they have feet. 
All she ever wanted
was to travel buoyant
in a worldspace so dense 
that any light is victory.

Soul weary. Let her rest a moment, 
let her crawl into the undergrowth of the casuarina 
cathedral, a dying mammal seeking solace 
in 
a 
narrow 
space.
And may the Cormorants 
and Great Egret, which sit atop this pine steeple
wake her from deathless sleep.
Otherwise, let lichen spread skin-wise, 
let blood turn to algae
and fungi cushion her feet.

Near the tidal river

For my friend, N.

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the jacarandas break their bloom.
he sang her Presley and Sinatra and told her of the fall-
skull-side, Broca-Wernicke side, 
brain space where words are born
after the fall and his syntax silenced and 
morphemes 
meandering.
he couldn’t speak but could sing Summertime, 
because you always remember your first
song. 

brotherfriend, she met him near the tidal river, where the terriers piss on her
buttress root stage, and the magpies munch worms in their paperbark stalls.
he watched her from his Tarago, 
but it wasn’t that sort of watching
and it wasn’t that sort of van and he chose his words
as though tasting, moving from mouth roof to tongue tip 
to lip so she caught the words in her eyes long before hearing
sisterfriend with the fiddle,
I didn’t want to disturb.
brotherfriend, she said, I was born disturbed,
beneath the sclerophyll sky, 
the air here is free
take a seat,
sing wordless for me.

brotherfriend she met him near the tidal river, where the mangroves swallow 
second-hand breath
he used to have nouns, 
abstract, 
proper, 
collective 
they used to hang from him and slide slipshod into speech. 
clever was a mask made of words, quick as the blue tailed wrens,
brotherfriend he sang to the aged, 
the dopamine deficient/ amyloid plaqued
brain dying,
-I bought him this before he passed. I can’t remember its name, three strings
 I’m leaving Sydney soon and I’d like you
to have this-

sisterfriend novice fiddler, joy junkie (connoisseur)
sisterfriend she walked from the tidal river, where the wordless gather in sound
because the jacarandas break their bloom 
and the terriers mark their trees 
and the mangroves gift them air and 
sisterfriend she walked towards heavy heat and bitumen boiling,  
a dead man’s dulcimer speaking
simply 
against her
sweat coated skin.

Not our 9th symphony (apartment clang)

For Jaki

Listen neighbour friend,
Not our ninth symphony but a song cycle,
Where the whimper becomes a roar.
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Come dance a jig, waltz, Charleston,
move slowly, move quickly, just move.
Play andante, allegro, just play
in time or out
Off-key or not-
don’t stop
don’t stop.

Come neighbour friend,
You bring the wind and I’ll bring the string. 
Rouse the feline chorus with a disquieting whir. 
And we’ll play as we dance over moss coated pavers, 
spring planters and silent doors. 
And if we fall let us rise, 
If we can’t play, let us sing.
If we can’t sing, let us shout.
This is not our 9th symphony so
let our whimper be a roar.

Like that, neighbour friend.
You move the wind while I move the string.
This is not our 9th symphony,
And our whimper is a roar.
Two four, three four
four four-
Keep playing, keep dancing.
Drown their war words with soul song.
Drown their shatter words,
their bludgeon words.
All those weapon words that fracture the air.

For more poems from The Fiddle Series, please see the Poetry tab on the left. https://word-upon-word.com/a-cry-for-help-unsolicited-poetry/