Mother Ganga

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Donna Waters 
From the shores of the holy Ganges


The sadhu squats low on the ghat.
Ochre robes lull in your water as he scoops.
Three times bending and three times scooping.
Just before dawn.

Day brings rich paradox.
Crowds come alone for their baptism. Others wash,
the thwacking of saris wave the boats on.
Your gentleness laps destitute steps.

The noontide herd of rickshaws and cows approach.
There is little room left to honour you. Still
men and women bow their offerings in
rhythmic genuflection.

Still you welcome them, their brass vessels,
their minute vibrations and prayers.
You welcome too the disoriented strangers
with their wonderment in camera bags.

It is long after dark now. The smell of flesh tangible
from the pyres offering their dead.
Red shrouded women and men in white
sit upright as the flames contort.

And they, the richer
are the fortunate ones.

You welcome them on their makeshift rafts. You mourn
for those left on the ghat. You weep
for those too poor for you
to carry them on their final journey. Still

You welcome.

István Nyári’s poem ‘The Sadu’ begins at home in India and ends with him wondering what he is doing down under. His poem about the strangeness of being in a foreign land resonated with me somehow. I wondered about his name and whether he was born in India. I wondered how he came to be in Australia. But his description of the Ganges was one thing we had in common: I too remembered travelling in India, the strangeness of being in such a deeply spiritual place far away from my home. ‘Mother Ganga’ is my response to the strangeness, the wonder and the commonality.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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The Dress

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Elisa Parry 
Not white, but close;
cream
a spiral of soap in water
the colour of teeth.
Yours had a gap.

We waited
for a gap in the
night.
Not silence, but close;
breath teasing heat
from our mouths
until our feet
swayed,
stayed
still.

The soft ripple of silk
in the night
not white, but close,
and then away
chasing breath
into the light.

Mother’s fingers
clever and soft,
supple as warm
wax against skin,
moulded
tight through mine,
spun stiches up my sides,
thin as the strands
of her hair
not white, but close.

In the photo:
the dress
smooth as milk and
the gap between
your teeth
hidden.

Gunda Klavins’ mother stitched her daughter’s wedding dress from US Army parachute silk. The dress is simple, its story is not. Gunda lost her childhood and older brother to the war. In 1947, in what was left of her hometown of Nuremburg, she finally had her fairy-tale wedding complete with ‘white horse and carriage.’ Then in 1950 she moved to Australia with her Latvian husband Wili and two young children. For Gunda, the dress is many happy memories; for me, it’s the happy-ever-after that some souls can spin from the most unlikely of silks.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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Wild Man

Posted on December 1, 2013 by David Adès

Wild man lurk behind eyes,
pace beneath skin.

Rocks rocks rocks rocks.

Wild man was always is.
He here not here.
He long gone close by.
Wild man take no answers.

Rocks rocks rocks rocks.

Wild man growl bottom of throat.
Snarl twitch muscles of face.
Wild man in streets, in bedrooms,
at schools, behind wheels.

Rocks rocks rocks rocks.

Wild man motion without pause.
He free of doubt or thought.
He adrenalin, instinct, primal reflex.
Wild man released from bindings.

Rocks rocks rocks rocks.

Wild man trigger pulling itself.
He run straight lines.
He everywhere lurking.
Wild man cannot be disowned: he kin.

Rocks rocks rocks rocks.

Beware wild man —
he not far to come.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

A Gift

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Marc Swan

for A.C.S.

And when the gulls dropped down within a long arm’s reach
we tossed broken Twinkies stuffed hurriedly by small hands
high into the air. The gulls swooped up, catching thick pieces
in their beaks, swallowing whole what may have been a femur
or a tibia or a rib burned down into fine wine dust, a few little
chunks, but mostly dust. My nine-year-old daughter beside me
stuffing more Twinkies, laughing at this adventure—grandpa
loved those Twinkies. She grasps this gift in her pint-size fist,
eyes expectant; oh the patience she held waiting minute upon
minute for the right moment to toss up and watch the swirling,
the squawking—a crescendo carrying him higher and higher

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Kosa: Hair

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Merlinda Bobis 
'I had very long hair ... but I was a cleaner, there were the children ... so I had to cut it,
and the German hairdresser said, "Are you sure?" ... So she tied a band around my hair,
looked away and cut.' — Terezija Vucko


Once in Port Kembla, she looked away and cut
Your hair, clean at the nape—and laid the brown plait
In your hands. 'Be sure to keep it,' she said,
Her face turned away to the ocean that witnessed your long journey
From home. Did she feel, in the roots of her own hair,
The salt spray? The wave that rocked your grief
In this severance from all your beloved?

   Mother plaiting your hair,
   Father touching it before letting go,
   Or the lamplight halo
   As you worked the strands of hemp for a tablecloth,
   And the Croatian night, its final kiss.

She looked away and cut—her hands and scissors,
Even her own scalp besieged by loss
She could not fully understand, just as
She could not quite say the word kosa—hair
In your own tongue, Terezija.
Yet in that moment of touching-cutting history, love,
Perhaps there was a sudden tug at the roots

Of both your hair, your kosa,
Of different stories of tenderness
Different longings—
Ah, how bittersweet
This gift of resonance, this knowing.

Inside glass, Terezija Vucko’s plait of brown hair. Intimate and vulnerable. Or perhaps it is I who has been rendered vulnerable. I am witnessing something severed from a body, a life, a history threading Australia and Croatia. Terezija tells me how this necessary ‘cutting’ happened in Port Kembla, in the hands of a German hairdresser. ‘Kosa,’ Terezija teaches me the word for ‘hair.’ She is pleased I can say it correctly. The German hairdresser could not. What other words could not be said? What other words were severed from the tongue of the German hairdresser or Terezija, or their children? They learned to speak English. But Terezija sings in her own tongue, and the words flow, are restored. The hair and all its threaded memories are returned to a body, a life, a history. ‘See this,’ she says. Beside the hair, a tablecloth spun from hemp under a lamplight on one Croatian night.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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A Geomorphology of Love

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Jess McLean

He says the way to his heart
is over stony deserts
through drifting dunes
along riparian banks
cut through glacial cirques
between braided streams
by the ablation till
away from the ash flow
behind the badlands
and around the taiga.

I’ll try that way first.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Tools

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Tara Goedjen
The story they tell here says that the river was formed when the god who made everything squeezed it from his wet hair. I want to believe in this but you scoff; you are the builder and I am the dreamer, you remind me. Here beside the river where our reflections part, a little boy sells flowers and a stick of incense. The incense won’t light in the wind, but the flowers you throw into the water drift away like small boats while we watch. Then we walk across the swaying bridge with our fingers unglued to the room where we sleep facing opposite directions. In the morning I wake to the sound of hammers and follow a map down dusty roads wet with spit. I pass a row of mules with satchels on their backs. A man tosses bricks up to the ledge of a gutted building, its insides full of iron poles and stones in crooked piles. At a gravel road where a machine spits cement, I walk uphill to a doctor named after a god who cleans out my gut with ghee. The doctor says that I was born with fire and confidence but warns that I should not be overly confident with men. He tells me to drink from the river for good luck and I do. After the sun sets I walk back to our guesthouse alone and still thirsty. I pass men with flashlights sawing wood and welding metal. They shout words I do not recognise; I move by them slowly as if underwater. At the door of our room I am full of stomach ache, a sickness I cannot cough up. I long for the tool belt that you left behind – tools which do not belong to me. You tell me I am my own doctor, my own builder, my own passage home. It is direction I lack, and my own dreams. I have put all my watery confidence in the god who would show me how to carve out my insides. How to use a pair of pliers to shape the holes. How to snap off the ends that do not belong. How to measure the straightness of a thing. How to knock down old walls. But the hammer is weighty and my grip is thin. My fingers greasy and wet. The key slips before the lock clicks open. Then I lose the map. The last thing that falls is your trowel, its blade the shape of a heart.





I’m in a room of glass. I see hair under glass, eggs under glass, clothes under glass, poems under glass – and then I see tools. Beside the tools are words in a frame. Ronald (Ron) Matthesius has taken great care to describe each tool, telling its story – the distance it has travelled from Brotteröde, former East Germany, and what it’s called. The ‘Jung’, the brand tiler’s trowel, and its function, to ‘guide.’ When I read the last description, I stop breathing: ‘the shape of the blade is like a heart.’ I know that this ‘heart’ has more stories to tell – other functions, other names, other journeys, depending upon who holds it. Here it is, under glass. On it is a reflection of my outstretched hand about to pick it up.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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Document of Identity

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Patrick MacGowan 
Remove the ID, remove the person - Mikhail Bulgakov


Grey coat sleeves at the border—
We’ll all know about the second world one day.
A passport takes us through the doorway
To reach for what’s in his heart, his dented suitcase.

One single page, matted pulp fibres.
Chopped monochrome photo, the mark ‘refugee’—
Beyond the barrier, his eyes quicken

And hopes flick fast like turning pages.
He dreams therefore he is, plus more.
A string of stops and steps and stages

Before the final quadrant unfolds.
He studies the signs. He’s a navigator,
Noting how even his signature changes
In this waxing light, as he steps ashore.

‘Document of Identity’ was inspired by Hungarian-born István (Steve) Nyári’s single-page Document of Identity in lieu of a Passport. I worked for the Department of Immigration for almost twenty years. The official story of migration to Australia is contained in warehouses stacked with files created by Departmental officers over many years. Then there are the personal objects and stories. Because a travel document is evidence of bureaucratic approval, for a time it becomes the most precious thing in the world for the person leaving home with few material possessions. How do we write about this vast journey in a mere one hundred words? How daunting! And yet, this is what poetry is. As the Chinese Book of Changes says, ‘a small fire can illuminate a whole mountain.’

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Conference Leave

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Ian Gibbins

All blank, all white, inhaling jellyfish,
coughing up thylacines, my best intentions
entangle, disentangle, bleach to silicon dust.
Scrubbed to translucency, my equilibrium fails,
both scabby knees bleed.

Below the exit sign, you sit, head in hands,
ringlets loose across the nape of your neck, almost
prehistoric, with neither gold chain nor pearls.
Your pen-point idles, uncommitted, no longer blue,
abandons vacant Cartesian grids.

A sketch. Our awkward pharmacology. Three
knocks at the door: counterposed, an illusion
of sirens, fire alarms shaking bamboo blinds,
flashlights, parquetry. Was it something I said,
failed to mention, never considered?

At least my passport is valid. I know
a dozen popular songs. My data have been
analysed: finally, the statistics are complete.
In an atmosphere of collaboration, I offer you
tiger lilies, coconut oil, analgesia.

Beyond our continental drift, the numbness
you covet, a licence to misfold mountain ranges,
to encourage clamber and trip and tumble;
each success, every loss tallied on fossiliferous shale,
the search and destroy we run together.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Banknotes

Posted on December 1, 2013 by William Alister Young 
A few words, numbers, a portrait always
Each the same, but different
Reich mark, Zloty, Franc, Pound, Dollar
Hope? Or maps of misery with funny names
Always held so tightly

For some, keys to unlock the gate
From the grey place so many could not leave
Where laughter-and-death waltz, hope abandoned
And still too many forgotten dreams
Sit somewhere in a dark and dusty drawer

How much breath passed with each note? What heart beat with panic or pleasure at the moment of exchange? People live together in families, but who are we really? In times of trouble, the answer can be an ID card or the thickness of the wallet. But money is not money. It is a promise of ‘Hopes and Dreams.’ To have this promise fulfilled we carry other artefacts to tell others, or to hide from them who we are: an enemy of the state, a hero of the revolution, a traitor not quite forgiven, or a child of any of them. Daniela Lewandowski’s Polish and Prussian parents, who survived World War II, brought these artefacts with them to Australia. These are part of their legacy: breath, heartbeat, hopes and dreams.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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Tectonics

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Matilda Grogan 
200 million years ago you could
have walked from Hungary
to Australia on a trail of plates
across Pangaea, sprawling humanless
and wild: before continental drift
fractured the landmass, before
the ocean’s shifting surface hid
the skeletons of ships and men seeking
new places from which to miss
the old places.
now your trail of painted
plates spans the vastest distances:
time differences, generations,
15,862 kilometres, and
the smallest, the most human:
flowers, flowers, flowers
that tumble, and bustle silently
together in porcelain frames
waiting for a knife and fork, a teabag,
a smudge of pink lipstick.

In Éva Gyarmati’s collection of painted porcelain, I see the grand narratives of migration and culture intersecting with the small, intimate stories associated with crockery used to feed our families, to celebrate special occasions and to welcome guests into our homes. After migrating from Hungary as political refugees, Gyarmati and her husband raised a family and built a life for themselves in Australia. Her collection draws on both her old and new homes to combine distinctive Hungarian Kalócsai patterns with Australian landscapes, flora and fauna. In my poem, I imagine these intersections: the grand histories of migration meeting the everyday rituals that keep us connected across oceans.

Return to Story Circle: The Transnational Story Hub and the Inspiraciones Literarias, a chapbook curated by Merlinda Bobis.

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nest nattering

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Geraldine Burrowes

nonchalant
cracks and kinks
in the orders of pecking
we wear all our lovers
away to find
ourselves

up at night
talkback minim and crotchety
deadpan timpani pineapple sharp

then a soft-clothed-earth parlance
meditative holding
enfolding
learning to draw all the intricate parts
till you shout
love

in the end
the body laid out

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Faithful to You, Te Tarahaka o Kaimatau

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Gail Ingram

Though the clouds fled from your armpits
in spectacular foggy spirals, he gave me red dust

compacted and thrust above the curved earth. Below
I saw the Early Ones warm their hands over fire

offering up babies wrapped in skin and blood;
I saw dingos and camels and dust. When I returned

you showed me the folds of your cloak, olives
gingers and greys slain with purple gashes. I fell among

the prickly matagouri that smelt of pink and tea
and woke in communion with a white gentian.

I stayed with you and named your parts: turpentine,
tussock, scree, kea, karearea, odonata zealandica,

who, in-spite-of my efforts, flit irretrievable incandescent
over the braids of the Deception.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Her French Toast

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Andrew Galan

Amanda rented in Newcastle a submarine, green
that had clear domes to see the anemones
the stingrays, the clown fish.
She filled it with one long French toast scent
before submersible sank from air
to creak down bubble rushes. Then
holding sterling silver splade and porcelain blue plate
while dressed in slightly stretch black satin vionnet
she sat on single thin red-cushion square
inside her boat bow glass observatory
washed by sea glazed refractions
Amanda smelt fried egg-bread
tasted serrated sugar portions
explored, through deep aqua sunbeams
the predators glide
the sharp reef, the seaweed lines.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

The Trademan’s Promise

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Justin Lowe

for Jez, Huw, “Disco” Dan, Anthony, Rufus and Paula

better to carve names
in a tree in some lost valley
known only to tribes long since
vanished like wisps of smoke
better to ask the wind the heedless
bitter fickle wind to carry your kisses
for the night to stop listening, better
for the age to stop conflating hubris
with pride and for the angry and the
disavowed to stop grasping for that
one perfect word that will melt the
edifice like a shadow, better all the
unloved and the loveless reach some
sort of pact and lie down together in
the molten dark of an improbable night
than that a poem of mine should ever
justify the leaden silence of this house

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

The Messiah

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Abdullah Noman

Somewhere within the reaches of the horizon
beyond the curtains of the South Eastern Highlands
I am space.
Devonian sandstones serpentinite rocks that shock
metamorphose
reduce to tiny particles under a microscope
I am a prisoner in a note of truth
Exploding drone pipe attack of the didgeridoo
Tangelo yellow blue bright blood dark
Scattered with glitter! Stark
naked.
Down to earth I walk among Dreamers
like saints in the midst of a rabble
in the quest for sanctity
Streams flow underneath my boots
harvesting angels draped in leafy pearls and flowery tongues
twisted around gasping chimneys of the modern city that clutter my mind
I degenerate and devolve and climax
into one
Even before I was
I am
And where I will be
I already was.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Rain

Posted on December 1, 2013 by J.T. Williams

I leave my shirt on
in the rain.
No hounds herd
me to the surf.
Here…this denim shirt
carries no secret
messages. It’s just
rain. Someone called
me a teacher.
I wonder
how the cats are.
The frog is a symbol
of luck in Japan.
In China, it’s the bat.
A black cat
made of wood,
left paw raised,
sits on my shelf.
Lucky as well. It’s said
he waved
at the Buddha
who turned
back to look.
But it’s only rain.
This is a cafeteria,
a solitary ride,
a stale beer,
a piece of cinnamon gum,
and rain that’s still
only rain. The dog
is a symbol of luck…
I am gray enough
to start turning red.
Rain isn’t hard.
I’m in the library
horrified by Frost
and his shattered glass
teeth—sharpened
rain spilled across the table
like sharpened rain.
If I chew on love,
my mouth spits rain
that is only rain.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Norfolk Island Pine

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Rob Walker

in the Pacific your point of origin
a speck of pollen

but a diaspora delivered you
to every beach resort

your trunk adolescent slim-muscled,
smoothskinned with occasional
acne and zits

your substitute leaves
scimitars
of baby claws,
stockwhips for the kiddies.

there’s surfwax oozing from your pores
yet the swell keeps slipping away
from your toes

You reach for the sky
you organic pyramid
and I’ll sit in your shade licking
a pine-lime Splice, our backs together, staring out towards the horizon …

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Gondwanaland

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Jessica Smith
erupting in waves
against the sheets
the waves against the pink-
tinged sand
white canvas for setting sun
an exotic arc
terrane the
bare
interior oceans like
that this used to be Australia
the Alabama

push
on the soles
all the organs together
all the organs
outlined in the hand

shores
the map of the whole body
condensed to a fetus

remember to breathe
water breaking
sedimentary memory
of proximal continents

that I hardly remember it
learn to
bear down

curled in the ear,
like an ocean
remember
the rush of
a small ocean
depleting

breaks
around a point
in the solar plexus

foreign to me,
my own memory
lodged in breath glottal

bodies in motion
bodies at rest

the new-born
breath

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

neurosity LXXX

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Jax NTP

madness in all shapes of lavender

an army of opportunistic pathogens,
recruiting bacteria, burgeoning in the nook
of a pale ear, your latest abscess,
about the size of an olive pit.

the self portrait of your sister haunts you
at 3 a.m. when you change bloody bandages.

the kaleidoscope of darkness
is also the size of an olive pit,
less of an almond, more like half a triangle.

si vis pacem para bellum.
if you seek peace, prepare for war.

when the draining stops, you stimulate
a series of reaction with a 9 millimeter
parabellum. when the voices

in your head start conversing in vietnamese
you’ll need a second pair of skin:
the largest organ, pretzel pulled.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Southern Cross

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Sharanya Manivannan

Because we cannot take these bodies into heaven,
we must ground them here in the arable of
afterglow.

Tooth and hair, sweat and musk.
Constellations to stardust –

I remember you.
I re-member you.

Here, hold still, here is the crux of it,
the point of entry, or the continental drift.

Let me taste in turn the holy stations:

shoulder shoulder
mouth
south

centres of pilgrimage,
exalted in perfect equilibrium,

and save for last that
sun-drunk supernova,
conflagration
within your ribs.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Studio Portrait

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Barnaby Smith

Strewn with commissions
and nibbles of DNA
this is where everyone else’s
attention falls.

With such frowsy deformities
sits one
throwing rhythm to colour
words into the mirror

defiant and horny at the
offensive knowledge of the canvas.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

The First Farewell

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Saradha Koirala

Pokhara 1978

Twenty-eight years
since the last goodbye
he brings me long blacks
tells me stories
from before my time.

One day I’ll document
this pre-history
let lines leak from my pen
let him explain the now
through the then
take his word for it
and take it as read.

Today I only listen.
I’ll say it’s only words
but even he
knows it’s words I value more
than anything.

A story ends with tears
in our eyes
I nod, of course
there’s always more:

the dusty unmarked road
of my family’s village
the bright rattling bus
the blonde woman
in jandals and cheap
cotton clothes, drifting
a world away from love.

There’s the man
who will become
my grandfather
in his favourite hat
– I imagine –
calculated steps
recognising gravity
in departures.

He wasn’t so old back then
walks his son home
with a comforting arm
as the bus carries on
mutters Babu
to grieving hands.

The story ends
in tears
just the first few drops
in a lifetime
of constant goodbyes.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Nether

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Bonny Cassidy

It stood, sweating
pages of ash.

_________

Stretched days stare
from stone and grass.

I run into their light, regretting everything.

_________

My fingers hook and unhook.
Listening to voices
hover up the wall and long bottles of flame explode.

The track lies
behind, shadows sleep through.
Turn it all upside down.

_________

You were young then

floated on water

and might have come with me to the sunken creek.

Now I bend
reflection flattens me
apart.

Now everyone has fire
they sit still.

_________

Embers jump from my mouth,
weeks collapsing.

The sky flies on.

_________

I’ve cut the evening

my face locked
one eye at a time.

_________

The warm dimensions of mist
move with me;
storming breaks ahead
and I blink forward, off the plain.

Do you have any idea

_________

Over itself the river’s drag
firm. Ascent

from paper soft with stench & thwack
of current hurtling.

_________

If a thin touch
spells out
down river

already I’ve passed you
(the banks brave, first star)
raising myself in time.

_________

My last face was streaked
with open water, buds caught in its silver
streams like mouths.

_________

Swamp bedding.

From its pattern
I separate
each blade clear—
no myth, I wade clueless—
the polis of moss in my ears.
Slowly twisting trees
crash to cinders.

_________

Your spine like smoke.

_________

The whole year is stripes
and grids of appetite;

wash away the surface—
eat it through.

_________

Into the apartments of sand
I entered flat under the door.

_________

Night tightens its grip.
Like an old moon

I rust in the pool

boiling
skinless and mineral blue.

Posted in PROTEACEAE | Tagged