Of Things Being Various

Yesterday an award-winning collection of poetry Of Things Being Various (40 Degrees South Publishing) was launched in the Hobart Bookshop in Salamanca Square.   This book showcases accomplished and engaging poems from Karen Knight, Liz McQuilkin, Liz Winfield, Christiane Conesa-Bostock and Megan Schaffner. 
Yet more evidence of the vibrant arts scene in Hobart.

The House that Dennis kept

High up in a Greenwich home

a chorus of birds brings dawn to my room.

High up in a Spitalfields attic, no birds sing.

Nothing disturbs the silence of death and decay,

not even the woman, whose face at the window

gazes down through the gas-light below.

A lonely canary is still being fed

though there’s nobody there in the house,

only whispers, reflections and clocks ticking on,

meals left half-eaten, warm fires and a cat

and someone who seems to be just out of sight.

Will she step from the shadows and speak
of the Huguenot weavers?

How they lived in the cellar and toiled full of hope

down the years.

How their status advanced as fortunes improved,

and in rooms richly-furnished and warm,

they rose up the floors

with the years.

 

Until wealth dwindled slowly, poverty neared

rooms lost their comfort and cheer,

and there in the attic the family perished.

As all turned to dust

with the years.

94 years in all.

So many lives to recall.

But nothing is certain in this house full of past,

where time seems to fracture and fray.

A woman’s life may be shaped and re-cast,

as a ghost that intrudes on today,

or fate might decree that she not live at all.

Was there only a house, with no movement, no talk,

no woman observing, no one out on a walk?

Just a woman ‘s profile on a window up high

a cut-out of cardboard?

or a face that won’t die?

Reading in the digital age

I've been thinking lately about how the internet is changing the way we read, think and behave.  At a  recent meeting of the Hamilton Literary Society, I read my poem (below) and asked members if we were losing the plot, as reading changes to accommodate digital technology.

Playwright R Foreman, Crikey writer G.Noble, as well as commentators J.Achenburg and B.Macintyre have all explored this issue recently and suggested that information overload creates pancake people (people spread wide and thin as they try to connect to vast amounts of data) or magpie readers (gathering bright buttons of information, before hopping on to some shiny new thing) and may even be threatening the very concept of culture itself.

Possible themes for the next meeting of our informal discussion group, perhaps.

When word was king  (how long ago was that?)

the news was in the paper to be read

in depth, at leisure, every word a thread

 to lives unknown and worlds  unseen.

Now image rules the world and slick and pat

the news is in full colour to be viewed

and words are only captions sparsely glued

on all and sundry’s giant plasma screen.

While in the logged-on world that followed that

a web of screens entices us each day 

to phone, to view, to scan and surf away

but not to question what our icons mean.

McDonnell Ranges, Alice Springs

In the beginning

I was here.

Long ago in the Dreaming,

when all that was

was sea and stillness,

I was here,

waiting.

When my time came, 

giant spasms shook the sea,

churned and strained, thrusting upwards

in cataclysmic shudders.

They ripped the sea's womb wide open
and flung me out into this world.

Mine was a violent birth,
but I was a long time young.

You didn't see me then, 

when I was young

and partly hidden high beyond the clouds,

my face all smooth, my body strong,

rising imperious, abruptly sheer

from endless flatness far below.

I was a roof for all the earth,

a sanctuary for those beneath,

who cherished me.

You didn't see me either, as I aged.

when the fierce winds came

and the storms raged and the rain coursed

deep into my limbs

etching furrows in my skin,

sheering offspring near and far,

as I began to falter

down the millennia.

Now that you've come

like all the others, 

and looked and wondered at this place,

remember that I'm old, like you,

grown heavy, wrinkled, as I'm weathered

slowly downwards,

in buckled, folded, jagged slide

towards the earth,

from where beneath

 my home is calling.

Yet on this day I still stand watch 

and talk to you, who stops and listens,

and contemplates how brief a stay,

is given us from dust to dust.

You feel my guardian spirit's touch,

enduring deep and long.

I feel your sense of kindred fate,

that all must end some day.

Remember then when your time comes,

the centre's heart will take you in

and I will point the way.

For until time itself is done,

I'll still be here to guard this land.

 

Sunshine State

Brisbane is a very different city from Hobart.  I was surprised by its vast skies, far horizons and heat shimmering over a never-ending flatness, when I visited family there. Their Brisbane suburb sprouted  suddenly out of long stretches of bushland cut in half by a major highway.  My visit prompted this poem.



Sunshine State

Up here where the sun is always on and the sky is forever blue,
everything lingers.

Only the road brings noise and movement,
its man-made pulse beats counter-point to the brooding notes of emptiness,
just over the Great Divide.

Up here where the road fractures the bush, great gums still tower.
Their grey-green presence is everywhere,
crowding the edges of things with darkness.

Immutable, mysterious,
encroaching.