ON THE WESTERN FRONT
The young ghosts move before the hillside,
row after row in grey across the grey,
all quiet now.
One looks back.
The film stops.
Glorious dead.
We’ve been taught how to leave the darkness,
stepping poem to poem: bells, rat, poppy.
But are we, blinking in the light,
heading out or in?
This war in our eyes,
isn’t it
ticking still?
Here, stand to
in the dawn,
listen! to those
microphones roar down
the road to Passchendaele.
WITH THE PEOPLE
(from Letter to my Daughter)
The long march has landed somewhere we did not want to be -
perhaps the map was wrong, perhaps the institutions
have stronger acids than we thought.
The markets grind, the nations rage furiously together.
Death glitters in the eyes of the generals, and the presidents
with orthodontic smiles look on the concrete and call it good.
But the people,
the people are still there.
Irritating: not exactly with the program,
not quite trusting the newsreaders,
not strict optimizers. In fact, every now and again,
some of them break out laughing.
The kids giggle together on their way to school,
jokes fly back and forth across the table,
I have no idea what about, and neither has the CIA.
I remember in Boston, a woman in a summer dress
holding hands with her mother and laughing on the subway platform;
today I met a man walking up Annandale Street
playing castanets on a stick.
The people are always more than they are supposed to be.
They are not airbrushed.
They are angular, wrinkled, bruised and sometimes short of breath.
A lot are shockingly poor.
Many ask questions. I remember a meeting in Oldenburg where the young people fell silent
while an old working man, through the fog between two languages, talked about women and men
and justice, and wondered had he spent a lifetime doing wrong.
The people are not united,
but they are not a sack of potatoes.
At the very worst, in the palace of the torturers,
there are whispers of love.
And at the best, there is mighty music
as the people keep on dancing
and laughter echoes/ through the forest of hopes.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
ON THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD
(From Letter to my Daughter)
Consider the lilies of the field,
the grey sunflower at sunset,
the red waves at dawn, drawing their signs on the sand.
Consider the great gestures of the trees,
the haze that lingers all day on those hills,
the dust blowing on a back road, dust that has no fear,
consider the rain and the cold wind.
Consider the screech of lorrikeets between the branches,
the sway of medusas,
the scurrying of crabs across the mud.
Consider the ones we cannot see with bare eyes:
the tiny ones, the round ones, the wriggling ones.
Consider the blazing darkness we can see
when our eyes get free of the city, turning night after night
towards the stars.
Consider the spaces in between the stars.
If I could roll them all in a bundle of words,
embroider them on a cloth, I would do so,
I would do so.
But a gift of naming and marking is at best an introduction,
a hand at the door, the first sketch of a map
that has to make itself, over long years,
as you walk among the hills. The intuition that counts
is to know the reality in a passing shower,
a dust devil, a grasshopper,
a wave running back down the sand.
These too are stars.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
POETRY IS, I WAS TAUGHT
Poetry is, I was taught, a concentrate of language.
It’s strange I should want to read again
a whole book of this stuff.
Surely a page would do. Take at most
five minutes of the poet’s time.
Preferably a second or two.
Not these years
skinned, pulsing.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
FAITH, HOPE
Broken Bay
It’s not the yellow cliff that catches your breath,
It’s not the bright shadows nor the sharp smell of the bush –
Rather it’s the way space leans over the water,
Jewel paths to imagined homes.
And the greatest of these
A long time ago we came upon the place
Our migrant hearts shuddered for.
Why has the sun gone in? For time
is love.
Career breaks
Anna plural builder, falling,
I’ve spilled books across the years.
A lumpy flood of laughter too,
And frightened by the sound of motors.
Open door
The metaphors are exhausted at the end of the day.
What can the poets do?
Quietly, fiercely, they should tiptoe away
To the world.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
CYCLONE WARNING
Streaming inland
the great rafts of cloud press on us
their gift of fear.
Waves will smash on the reef,
rain will weigh on the trees.
O my love,
why was the sky clear
before your call?
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
SOR JUANA
I have been reading Octavio Paz’s biographical, literary and historical study Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Faith. It was published in the 1980s, almost exactly three hundred years after Sor Juana’s first volume of collected poems. It tells a dramatic story: a poor creole girl, illegitimate in an era when ancestry mattered, who was sent to Mexico City and became a favourite of the Viceroy’s wife and a member of the glittering viceregal court. At the age of twenty she left the court and became a nun.
Then, against all odds in a patriarchal society, she carved out a career as poet, and in twenty years became one of the most famous poets of her age. But women were not supposed to do that, they were supposed to shut up and be obedient. Sor Juana attracted the hostility of the insanely misogynistic Archbishop of Mexico, and other influential clerics, and eventually they did terrorize her into shutting up.
It’s always interesting to see one poet’s version of another poet; I thought of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, for instance. The literary and social conventions of Sor Juana’s age are very distant; what Australian poet would spend page after page praising the Prime Minister and comparing her to classical goddesses? But once you get inside those conventions, you can see how a poet makes them work. John Donne made staggeringly beautiful poetry out of post-mortem praise of a young woman he had never met.
Octavio Paz makes a case that Sor Juana is in certain ways strikingly modern. Not only in her feminism – though there wasn’t a coherent feminism in the seventeenth century, Sor Juana did write in defence of women against hostile stereotypes. She also had a vision of human struggle to understand a vast and complex universe, remarkably independent of the religious rhetoric of the day. She reminds me of some tough and radical nuns I have met in the peace movement. But the hierarchy got her at last.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
MARGARET’S KITCHEN
My mother's house, 2008
This room she planned herself. It flowed
Into the breakfast room,
Which was also the sewing room,
And the room for writing letters,
Paying bills, giving cups of tea,
And keeping toys for children on a visit.
This was the destination of the house.
It smelt of bread, detergent, roasting lamb.
It made me think of a vicarage
In a country town: things centred here.
But here, too, she kept a Russian carving,
A Chinese sketch, a Danish paper heart.
This kitchen connected to the world.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
VOLCANO NEWS
Mt Merapi, November 2010
Mt Merapi, November 2010
In the night, it might be distant thunder.
The morning city’s grey with ash and rumours.
The men talk tensely, the women hand out masks,
each motorcycle trails a cloud.
News seeps in:
two villages - a hundred souls
safe in their homes -
gone under searing gas.
Witness escaping on the coast road, look back
to view God’s wrath, and see a nothing
- might be cloud, might be smoke, ash, steam -
vast across the sky.
Refugee for a couple of days, sick as a dog, I’m delivered
to the capital, to the airlines, to the world,
and travel on. But opening my passport find it
stamped with volcano news.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
REFUTATION OF NERUDA
Nació
la palabra en la sangre,
creció en el cuerpo oscuro, palpitando,
y voló con los labios y la boca.
[The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and flew through the lips and the mouth.]
No,
not that red milk-train chugging through the hills,
taking the eggs to market and garbage to the tip.
Wrong metaphor entirely.
Words are born
from the break of the stupendous ocean
on the dawn beach, where she walked past the headland
towards me.
Words are born
from silicon and metal as we users
grope, hopeful,
across the net.
Words are born
in the immeasurable space between
the Messenger
and the Angel.
________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________
DRY SEASON, KIMBERLEY
A hawk drifts across the hill face
watching the white trees, the red rock,
the brittle grass.
Nothing else moves.
This is the quiet season
in country you could love,
where the hard hill and the sparse trees
grip on the skyline.
Another time, they say,
the rain comes, the wind and lightning,
in a torrent of blood-red mud
the land is changed.
There, you can see the scars below the cliff.
Yes, that sounds familiar. When she died I felt
the land change underneath my feet,
the rock melt.
What does remain
- something always remains -
in the dry season
are the trees gripping the hard hill,
the hill gripping the sparse trees,
the hawk drifting down the wind.
