Satan’s Riders

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Jim Everett

well we might think our world is dead
with visits from the devils
these white-men who came with their guns of hate
yes the one’s who came as men of God
came here to face us with their evils
bringing white sails and loaded guns
to kill to rape and plunder
with mission-men who brought The Book
they came with words of thunder
and so they savaged all they took
for their whim was to make us suffer
to suffer for their savage nation to grow
ever onwards to be called Australia
with God’s word they killed some more
and use His name to make us bow
embrace their church and know his law
to not be here yet be their mill-stone
as vermin they killed us mob by mob
yet now they want our souls down-under
in strength our struggle is our Country
so strongly we challenged the man-god laws
owned by white-men His law decided
who we are and where we go
we see their washed hands still unclean
from the things they did in man-god’s name
look at the tracks to their savage lair
where priestly man-gods say God is truth
and the white-men say that we must follow
and so we follow with grace in struggle
our journey takes us to see your white-man gods
where we can see men in the papal bull
yes the papal bull’s words that lie in thunder
making secret miracles from twisted words
they pressure down on their true believers
on these good church people true to all
accepting all people in their churches
until the man-gods judged their very souls
and the papal Horn made their blood to flow
for they could kill and rape and plunder
like those before them who ruled with power
these man-gods came with evil doings
they saved the priests who loved their man-god
priests who did things and the children cried
the men’s plan blocks their women’s pathways
for they did as they did to save their image
and save the ones with privileged powers
ordaining men alone to talk with God
giving the men power over unbelievers
while the world watches evil in the churches rituals
we now see blackfellas following to find a new peace
in our peaceful ways we went for hope in God
our mob followed churches the men-gods made for us
yes we followed them through to see their popes
we followed a trail they left in His words
those twisted words the popes do tell
we followed their tracks into the centre
the man-god tracks to the Vatican tomb
going down where they keep their secrets
down deep in the dungeons far below
again we saw those words so wicked
down in the tomb with the popes of old
there we see the Horns in golden glory
these are the Horns where popes will pray
a pope will pray and so his priests will
forever to hold His law in their Book of God
to carry his words for all believers
believing a lie through a man-god’s magic
making God in man then twisting the image
while they all sit here with a secret God
the Horns hold secrets of men-god savages
in Satan’s tomb where His Horns are revered
we watch this lie where white-man is God now
where all believers see the lie as true
the madness is in believing the lie of magic
you white-men expect gratitude for all you did us
and you tell us to believe a man-god lie
to believe He is God alone and mighty
to love Him and cherish Him as the God on high
you lead us on a path where we are the strangers
and we see the evil forces that we must challenge
in your Australia we look and see hate and misery
and you feel our struggle against man-god magic
in our struggle for freedom in the natural world
with strength of Country we have powers from way back
to force truth from the lips of your man-god priests
who’s snouts in troughs sated savage cravings
we will force them and push them in the public eye
until the horns are broken into millions of shards
and in our time we will deliver our sermon of Country
our words of wisdom in the patterns of knowing
of a Country old with our stories to tell you
to end man-gods rule and the savage priesthoods
until nothing is left of your disciples of Satan
and freedom is our Mother set in Country we know.

Posted in PROTEACEAE | Tagged

Long Form Thought

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Emma Barnes

You are the inside out left hand glove
I slip onto my right hand in morning
too dim to tell what I’m doing. You do
the job. My whole body is one giant
fracture as I force it to walk on one
foot then the next in a well worn path
to the centre of our small universe.
You created me a library of leaves to
crunch through in afternoons spent on
trying to time travel without the more
conventional use of science. Science
is to be used sparingly like cocaine
or cayenne. As the rain works itself
through the little stitch holes in my
raincoat I imagine I am the water
and my body is your memory of ice
melting in your mouth after you
crunched it to pieces with teeth.
When the air is blood temperature
you unzip me and hand out my
calm disposition to children clam
-ouring in the street. We run round
together and fall down flat at the
end of the song. In this way we are
respecting the parts of our heritage
that are the same and allowing space
for your skin and my gender to fall
apart on an as needed basis. This is
the more common romantic avalanche.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Nightwork

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Bonny Cassidy

Conveyor belt wriggling into action, cries

rubbish rocks rubbish rocks

the machine breaks floodlight, its flash
a stingray covered, uncovered.
The bulldozer rearing—
pandanus bows

with a shake dissolves
drone tyres.

From the rocks and rubbish
one kid
naked, thick-haired and furiously sweeping
a path through reeds

pandanus shakes

entranced by armfuls of trucks
manganese
as stingrays. The old men spin
like tyres covered, uncovered.

It’s the sixties, then it isn’t.

Posted in PROTEACEAE | Tagged

Halfway Home

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Mark Tredinnick

Vancouver to Sydney, Monday 8 May 2012

Dawn breaks for three hours straight along the wing
Of a 747, six thousand miles behind me, two thousand
Miles to go, Pentecost Island like a small light off the tip
Of the port wing.
While I lay across three seats impersonating
Sleep, a whole day disappeared; it happens all the time. The sea
Is blue and legioned and steep with days, and it’s fifteen hours
Across. The Pacific is an isobaric book of tides beneath
Me that has swallowed up where I’ve been.
But as long as my watch
Tells me the time I left behind, I’m still halfway there: midday
Tuesday in Vancouver; five a.m. Wednesday in Sydney; no time
At all where I am, thirty-six thousand feet above Noumea.
You step into an airport near midnight and mountains fall
Away. Everywhere you’ve been, shut like a child’s pop-up
Book, till the next time someone picks it up.
Your old life
Ahead of you yet, waking without you; you’re a thicket
Of afterthought, swimming home in high cloud.
But home
Is a fable, too, from this height, and you hang stateless, Aeneas
On a string that no one holds. You’re rowing home high in a medium
As mythic and elegant as Virgilian hexameter.
Nearing home
Is like remembering the future, and you’re hungry to make it
New this time, truer than how it’s ever run before.
But everything of course—once one lands—
Will be much the way it was.
Nearing home,
You’re a ghost walking out of rehab, stepping back
Into a body you cloaked while your inner life wandered
The peneplain; you’re putting on old clothes now
At thirty thousand feet and trying to stand up in them again.
Dawn’s still breaking hours later, when time starts to remember
Itself. History resumes, the sea resolves to come to an end; you tighten
Your belt and feel the plane relent.
Home is an island
Below you now, clouds bivouacked along its eastern shore; home
Is a theatre of war in its own aftermath, and an army of other ghosts
Is massed there, waiting for the right wind
to carry them way back out beyond their depth.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Nostos

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Mags Webster

All through the flight you’ve had Cavafy
playing in your mind. Is it true that arriving here
is what you’re destined for? Call it homing
rather than homecoming, for once the airport
doors seal the vacuum of miles and time,
it’s as though you’ve never been gone.

An easterly blows from the night-washed hills,
the air is warm and soft as ironed cloth. You breathe
blue flames of eucalypt, till your body unlocks
its prodigal shape, and distance is cleansed
from your bones. Since you went away, your life
has lacked its tinder. You’ve tried to belong

elsewhere, gathered knowledge from scholars, bought
fine things. Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—you’ve carried them all
in your soul. But this place has burned in you
since birth, coloured your sleep with cochineal,
shrilled it cobalt blue, and your body won’t quit

trying to pull you back, searching for the heart
it buried in the dirt, a lodestone fired
in desert and sky, cooled in the Indian Ocean.
Blue flames breathe in you. Way beyond the rim
of the airport lights, you know there’s emptiness
as full as you’ve ever seen, where you become part

of the scansion of land, its accents of Spinifex
and schist. Gorges brim with a brazen edge.
A daytime moon spreads a scallop
of lace. Hills mount a ghost-hazed wave.
You wait as the bleach of afternoon light
darkens to the palette of dusk. Lilac. Plum.

Russet. Silver-sage. This land has archived
colour and time, when you press your palm
against the warmth of stone, you touch
the whole earth’s story. And if yours
were the only skin left behind to recite
from the chronicle of place? Embedded

in this dossier of rock, in ancient script,
are words which make sense of home.
But will you ever learn how to own
their shapes? Will this be your Ithaka?

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Last Morning in the Country

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Mran-Maree Laing

Out of the morning—
the yawning blue, sleepy-eyed
morning where the leaves rustle
like bed-clothes and the fence-post crows
drip rippling notes
into the steeping silence—
rushes the wind.

I stand stooge in the paddock—dozing a dream
of childhood paddocks: long grass subsides
beneath the sun; the thistle bristles
its prickled crowns, claims its brief footsore territory; crickets weave
a gauzy haze of sound and
off in the encircling stands of flooded gums the call
of the whip-bird falls
and falls
and falls

when the wind comes—scything the grass
into her arms like the past—

she tousles the trees, shakes
the cows from their sleep-ins:

herds of clouds stampede the sky,
a water dragon, posed like weathered wood on
a weathered log, skitters away—dappled
skin into dappled shadow—and the river
murmurs feebly over the rocks before swallowing
its words—until all I can hear
is the wind—roaring
through the treetops like a new world.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Approaching Paradise

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Sarah Holland-Batt

Here in the white, white wing of a gull
you may glimpse paradise. In the flensing sun.
The prodigal sea, bent back on itself,
has the rough green mind of paradise.

Paradise is in the breadfruit’s low sling,
the purple scrawl of bougainvillea up a wall.
It is in the yachts’ clatter and wheel,
the fishermen’s nylon stringing the wind.

You will find paradise in a whiting
drowning in a bucket of freshwater,
in the jammed blade of a fishscale
like quicklime under the thumb.

Women roast themselves in coconut oil
and children run bare-legged in paradise.
Praise them. And praise the black-faced bat
traveling even in sleep through paradise.

This fringe of stormstreaked shacks
with genuflecting surfers riding in,
this line of Norfolk pine. Wet dogs
nosing the muck of a king tide.

Praise the bloated body washed in,
the gentle nibbling of baitfish and bream,
bikini-clad tourists yanked out by rips,
the summer and violence of paradise.

A shark’s slit corpse gapes pink on the jetty,
its head yanked on a hook like a sacrifice.
Its shank is smooth and black as paradise.
Men with knives kneel down like seraphim.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Home Hogar

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Inspiraciones Literarias - Spanish-speaking Writers 
Where my heart sings,
Donde mi corazon canta.

It could be kin, then places, country, town, street.
Finally, a dwelling place with floor, ceiling, doors and windows.
Through those windows, I see the outside world.

Despues podrian ser los familiares, lugares, pueblos, calles
Finalmente un lugar habitable, con piso, techo, puertas y ventanas.
A traves de las ventanas puedo mirar hacia el mundo exterior.

From the porthole of the ship,
I saw The Sydney Harbour Bridge,
With its wide, warmest arms. It is my home.

Desde el ojo de buey del barco
Vi El Puente en La Bahia de Sydney,
Con sus anchos y calurosos brazos. Es mi hogar.

The first time I saw Australia
Through the window of the plane
The sun was glinting off the waves.

La primera vez que vi Australia
A traves de la ventana del avion
El sol estaba brillando sobre las olas.

Years ago walking around Uluru,
Early in the morning,
I felt I was at home, with my family.

Años atras caminando alrededor de Uluru
Una mañana temprano,
Me senti en mi hogar, con mi familia.

Love and Peace. Amor y Paz

Home—the little corner
Of my father’s arm.

Hogar—el rinconsito
En el brazo de mi padre.

Warmest home
Where we live, where we rest

Hogar sentimientos de calor
Donde vivimos, donde descansamos.

The world around me
Friends, trees, the ocean, waves and seagulls.

El mundo alrededor
Amigos, arboles, el oceano, las olas y las gaviotas.

The world outside me
Those homes are people, countries, cities,
Buildings, houses.
Sadly sometimes very poor shanties.

El mundo fuera de mi
Aquellos hogares son gente, paises, ciudades.
Tristemente, algunas veces poblaciones pobres.

Home—the picture hanging on the wall,
The undeniable scar.
Still, the sun shines behind the cloud
Unashamed of who we are.

Hogar—el cuadro colgado en la pared,
Una cicatriz no se puede negar.
Aun, el sol brilla detrás de la nube,
Sin vergüenza, de quienes somos.

Home—anywhere from a branch in a tree
To the cloud in solitude.

Hogar—en cualquier lugar, en la rama del arbol,
O en una nube solitaria.

Home is already here. Home is me.
Hogar esta aqui. Hogar soy yo mismo.

Any sword has a case, any migrant a suitcase.
You are my skin. I take you everywhere.

Cualquiera espada tiene su vaina, cualquier emigrante una maleta.
Tu eres mi piel. Te llevo a todas partes.

Where my heart sings,
Donde mi corazon canta.

The South Coast’s Inspiraciones Literarias–Spanish-speaking Writers wrote a collaborative poem about hogar/home with Tara Goedjen. For the group originally from Chile and Spain, home is born in two languages, Spanish and English, as Cleo Pacheco writes:

Cuando los rayos de sol caen
sobre la faz de la tierra
el Corazon del poeta explota 
nace el hogar.

As the sun’s rays fall and make
ripples on the face of the earth
the poet’s Heart explodes
home is born.

She adds, ‘The bilingual home is where [the poet] finds repose … the home within.’ This embodiment of home is echoed by Juan Quiñones who says he is ever linked to Chile with ‘a very long umbilical cord.’

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

Posted in STORYCIRCLE | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Deosai Plains

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Cory Collins

are baptized in July
with four thousand
pink scimitar-flowers,
trampled and chewed
by wild, wild goats.

Snowcocks hound their temples,
the smoking rockscape
hollows that seem to breed
in this part of Pakistan,
and house the Himalayan
marmot and ants
that dig for gold.

They are a national park
at the foot of eight thousander
mountains, the giant
ribs of God with names
like Everest and Makalu.

Bearded vultures whip
and splash like fleets
of kayaks in the sky,
piloted by Choctaw
shaman daughters
or sorcerers from Pyke.

One bird will gnaw
the blossoms and rest
at Jaisalmer, the city
where yellow foundations
rise like mountains
of powder and coal,
gnarled and broken
as the marrow
in an eaten bone.

But back to the plains
it goes in a week,
perching on viny terraces
where manioc and peaches grow,
wild and invasive,
thrumming in the brutal wind,
dancing in a horde.

The flowers, goats, birds
and ants and rats are conjoined
in purple tongues,
blades of summer grass
lifting in a requiem
and pentecostal glow.

They float over churches,
mosques and the stone turtle
at Karakorum range,
and for miles of Pakistan
until it is swallowed in the shore.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Mama Gondwana

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Victoria McGrath

mama cracks the arm back
rips my body from the crater of its birth
shakes it splitting
black lands from black lands
tearing
down
a
jagged line
faults on every side and schism
rift and drift and lava flows muscle memory
forming mountain chains
a spine

mama punches my buckled crust and the legs
drifting westwards from the rip zones
bleeding
in a deep sea bed separating sediment
scorpions
whale skeletons in sand

mama dumps the debris a crumpled carcass
dried like fossil ferns and set
dismemberment
and in her rain shadow I am Cambrian cold
smelling laurel forests and lungfish
south polar dinosaurs

cracks through a pangaean heart

mama
please stop

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

live through

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Owen Bullock

a pottery angel
rises from the mantelpiece

to the gallus energy
of new morning

the entelechy of words
works through sleep, we dream

repeats, we have
all the time in the world

to design cities
weed vegetable beds

watch pittosporum flowers
bloom and dwine

I have faith
that the buddhists

will manufacture moments
for those who are short

when they get their commercial arm
fully muscled

the wise man is not erudite
and so say all of us

it’s almost morning, trucks
thunder the road

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Time Scratched Record

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Indigo Eli

I write his scratched word into a record. My time, his daughter’s hot, long day. I write to find water. I write of him to see that he was, to see that he was my father, was one of my people. He was one. He is one, two, many people. He said “we can”. I did write my father with his “we can”, with his hot, long sound, water for his daughter’s word. No sound did come out. No scratched word made it down to my father’s record, like these.

I did find water. I did find my sound, scratched in his record. He was my father. This, his daughter’s record, is my word, my find, my ‘him’.

We could write so long on ‘father’, we could write a long scratched record of ‘him’. We could out all of his sound, many may look to this, number my word. Each word divides a record of time that you and I know, that they will see as ‘them’ as ‘scratched’.

I know this, but I write. I am his. I am his daughter’s time. I am his record and so I look to record all the sound, each word he did make, each time he said ‘how’, each ‘and’.

At first people will dry their time, the record scratched, hot with no sound to water to water the father they could not find. We could make this long thing a time to use. We could call them in, water people with the sound, make a long thing, a long time, many people, a record of many people, each their own scratched daughter’s word. We could. At first people may side with ‘him’. Then with ‘her’. In time they will know two people as one thing.

When each word has a deeper use people will know. This time I write, I know. I know he has been.

I know water. I know the sound of that record I scratched. I know each downside, but by some hot overlook I write his sound, know it will be my water, know. I know I will have some of him to find each scratched day in this, my time.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

Cape Weed

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Dianne Millett

Cape weed wears
cowards’ colours
chokes healthy feed
with jealousy
true native fields borne
by generations
made useless
by polluted seed
bearing strong
on the genome
twisting in to hook
and hold
like burrs.

Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND | Tagged

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.

Posted in STORYCIRCLE | Tagged ,

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.

Posted in STORYCIRCLE | Tagged ,

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.

Posted in STORYCIRCLE | Tagged ,

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.

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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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