Stillness and Flight

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Jeffrey Smart, "Approach to a City"

Within this mist we could be anywhere:
A grassy knoll sits where the freeway
Meets the the Bridge; the air is frozen today
And the smell of Vegemite hangs in the air.
Chimneys puff in protest or in vapour prayer;
The sky in its veil has nothing to say,
But my father’s taught me in his silent way
To see the spots where grace snaps through the snare –
And there are many. If my mind is still,
I can count in fingerprints of Light
These scattered signs that put the fear to flight.
Schedules muffle anguish. Let them stand until
The day declares: “Not you, not even you,
Can conquer us – we belong to the true.”

Birthday Song (Apologies to Sylvia Plath)

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Today would have been the 95th birthday of my maternal grandfather who passed away nearly nine years ago: a man who influenced me and my writing more than one poem can express. Still, I couldn’t let the day pass without acknowledging it in some way, especially while I’m in the midst of writing about my family and childhood. So, for what it’s worth, here is something little to say that I love him still.

Love sets me writing like a Grandfather clock:
Love of him as much as anything else.
While his van is parked in our drive, I sit
With a cup of Twinings tea as he tells
Of Abel Magwitch, and Crusoe, and which
Works of Dickens’ he has never read.
I stuff words and stories wherever they fit,
Dreaming of graveyards and convicts. In bed
I compose my own Kidnapped, see pages
Like plates of delicacies, shelf-tables spread
As feast before me. I taste the ages
And grab pen to write: first of Samurais,
Then peace – whatever the mind engages –
In words like airboats breaking through the skies.

Memory in Rain

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Two children looking at construction work being undertaken on St Thomas’ Church of England in Essendon around 1932.(https://au.pinterest.com/pin/524669425310543785)

Essendon is drenched today. On Albion
And Buckley where my Granddad learnt to walk,
To talk, lies last night’s deluge in puddles,
In screen of watery sheen, while vermillion
Morning climbs the eastern sky. When we talk
Of heritage, does it sit in huddles
Like these? old buildings nestled in new ones
And the streets changing names, permanent as chalk,
Captured somewhere in memories like muddles?
Sometimes, when brain’s geography failed,
He fancied himself back on these streets,
And spoke of St Thomas’s where he’d been hailed
As Stupid Stuart. What memory repeats
Is mystery; beneath rainy road is soil
That, pre-Alzheimer’s, Granddad learnt to toil.

Mind and Soil

As part of my new writing project, My Family and Other Landscapes, I’m setting myself the challenge of writing one sonnet each day for the next few months. I won’t post all of them here, but I’ll make semi-regular updates and select the best to put together a book from them. Here is today’s effort.

He tells stories all the time: some are true,
Some are not (the most fun is had from these);
And on some garden afternoons he weaves
Stories of made-up distant lands, and you,
Adventurer you are, embark into
His terraced Sydney woodland. Though he leaves
You off on your sojourning (and may heave
A sigh to see you occupied, it’s true),
He’s there in every game, and will stay
When games are done and memory is all:
Turning compost by the garden wall,
Tilling soil for poetry to grow.
The life of mind is given birth right here,
Where joy springs out of safety, ever clear,
The love that held, will hold and won’t let go.

Debt

Acknowledgment sounds with our morning yawn:

We have been in need; we have been held safe.

And the quiet of the dawn routine declares

That we are weak, are strangers to this day.

Awaken slowly. Infants in the world,

What will you do now? Fresh from the night’s grace,

Will you shake your horn’s fist at the first sight

Of anguish lurking at the silent light?

Forgiven much, enrage. The open space

Of day defies you. If all now unfurled,

How would it be to wait, to be, to say

Yet not my will? Grace’s true cost lies there

And we are not prepared. Our kinship chafes

As we seek love, reluctant, through the dawn.

My childhood with Sting

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Well, he once rhymed “cough” with “Nabakov” and poetically asked, “Hey Mr Brontosaurus, have you got a lesson for us?” And now Sting has unknowingly inspired my latest writing project.

The inspiration came via this TED Talk and interview he did in 2014 about how he overcame writer’s block. What was Sting’s answer to his affliction? He realised that he was getting in the way of his work – that there was too much of him and that he needed to step aside and let others speak. How he did that is his story to tell, and you should let him tell it – the TED talk is a compelling listen. But in short he started tapping into the stories of the community that he grew up in, the community he’d been so eager to put aside when he discovered his own artistic potential.

I guess it’s fairly common for a writer to be full of themselves. I don’t want to be. What struck me about Sting’s story was the realisation that it could so easily be true of me. And so, while on holiday with my wife in southern Queensland where I spent ten of my earliest years, I conceived of this new project: My Family and Other Landscapes, a tribute to the places and people that formed me. I can’t guarantee that I, like Sting, won’t get in the way of my work doing its job. But I hope I can honour a few other people and places on the way. I hope you can join me as I post some of the poems I write and start announcing soon ways that you can be involved.

Home

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It snowed the week I was born; my brother
and sister, fresh from Sydney, harvested
July joy with tingling fingers, gathered
what they could in eager clumps and pressed it
like ice cream into a punnet, to freeze
and store for future days. Being born late
I missed the fun, but days of ten degrees
trained me for cold; I could never equate
the Queensland warmth when we moved up north with
home, or the way things should be. The first sigh
of frozen breath, I puffed my Arctic wish,
ignoring trees that caught me in my lie.
Home is what our aspirations miss,
where daydreams stop and cognisance is bliss.

Other Places #1: Beginnings of a new project

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Jeffrey Smart, "Crossing, 1997"

Ding the lights of the level crossing red;
The common man is held at standstill now.
He measures plight in traffic lights and how
Great the cost to take the Bridge instead.
The day is long but time spent here is dead,
Growing only lines on furrowed brow.
I will not kneel to son of man nor bow
To what your flashing indicators said…
This is, I’m sure, not how today should go;
Yet everyone’s caught up in it the same:
To dream of other places where we may
Ride out our days without delay or foe,
To cast off self and hurl each other names
And long for streams where stress is washed away.

Haven’t You Heard?

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Jeffrey Smart, "Airport at Night"

Some will sit as though nothing’s new,
staring at the constant sky.
I confess that I’ve done so too
and held the lie.

Some will wait for what does not come
and think that waiting is divine.
Some will fall and some will run
until the time.

Yet in the terminal of souls
a voice cries out. What does it cry?
“Don’t you know?” it calls and calls.
Some will reply.