Tag: 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 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.

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.

The runner

From The Human Mammal (2020)

The undutiful daughter/errant lover
is always running
she runs, and
is it the movement or the cadence or the stride that keeps her safe? 
You can meditate to your footfall, they tell her. 
Leave the tunes at home and 
listen to the sounds you make in the world. 

And-
trust is this, it’s the thud of her feet on the pavement. 
She’s never been a speed racer, preferring endurance races. 
Trust is being able to run at a moment’s notice- 
she has always judged women who wear high heeled shoes harshly. 
Always wear shoes that allow you to run at a moment’s notice.

Despite the lactic acid building in her calves, and her aching arches, 
she will keep running… 
Away from rather than running to?
Away from the relational goalposts that are always moving 
(at least the finish line is fixed in a marathon) 
the steps, the rules 
one step in front of the other-
The not good enough rules that she can never predict 

Eggshells: all those eggshells that she teeters upon-
At least.
At least when she is running, 
she is fifty percent airborne, 
it’s the closest to flying without being in a metal jet-fuelled box, 
and
 unlike all the accusations she cannot predict.
what she didn’t do right, what she did too much of, too much, not enough
	youdidit yesyoudid

Anger that hovers as fertiliser, 
the easiest type of bomb to make 
that’s why Bunnings won’t let you order online, 
no they won’t, not even during Covid.
You did it on purpose, you’re fucked in the head-

Just keep running.
When she runs, she sees anew, she sees the river, 
and with each footfall, the houses crumble at the foundations, 
the Moreton Bay figs disentangle their roots, 
and the mangroves rethread themselves, cleansing the river 
And she keeps running and she keep seeing,
where Pemulwuy fought those skinless devils, who harnessed fire for evil:
where the river fed the people like a mother, 
serving up feasts of shellfish amongst the old salt flat marshes and swamp oaks.

Just keep running, she tells herself, 
gravity is a game of flying and falling. 
Just run, when you run,
you’re free
to fall 
like a human mammal.

Obituary

an industry secret: a
monarch’s obituary is written
years ahead of death, 
yes, same with other
heads of state, 
revolutionaries, 
A listers:
in the event of sudden expiration,
just click send

this your day, of single wrapped
stale Arnott’s, delta creams crumbling
in tannin-stained mugs of tepid Lipton tea 
and who were you on this day
that may be your last
a friend who could have been a lover
leaves her glasses on your crochet throw, 
and you 
breaking again 
fold into yourself rocking gently on 
your faux deco rug, teal and soft

did you love enough
were you enough to be loved 
did someone love flesh and bone you
and not just the idea of you:
were you enough?
it is easy to think of yourself 
in the
 past tense.

lifenoise

so these are the sounds we archive:
two fences and three houses away
a border collie howls for its pack
and you feel the keening the cruelty 
dogs are not built for solitary life and 
an average of three per career your union mate says,
train drivers see three jumpers
on average and you knew a woman once
at university she had three kids and threw
herself in front of a train metal crunching steel
momentum arrested in the air
desperation archived into ears

and we stand in the darkness screaming
arched backs and tilted skulls 
howling at dead stars or space junk or sulphur
all rhythm begins in the belly an exhausted rumble
because children/work/partners/capitalism
because a woman only has two arms
but labours as though she has eight
and the night running men
(yes, men because only men feel safe without light)
ignore the lifenoise, the life screeching-
it is no surprise that a woman can scream forever.