shadows form veins across the earth
stretch outwards expand dissipate
into soft permeable spectres
a colourless friend reflected
hopeful
one day you will shed a branch
or leaf
watch it fall and meet at the intersection of your feet
a mycelial network sits
substrate beneath the city
like a hivemind of live-wired trains
speak hunger
transmit food
fungi plug themselves into the network
of delicate lacework
and symbiotic aunts
I’ve heard when you drown it feels peaceful
Like floating in the womb
In a homespun shroud of blue water.
You found another way
Far from the sea, the salted shallows
The paperbark trees that lined the tracks like a church
And the skeletons of cuttlefish you carved into stories
With your fingernails.
Stranded in the red dirt
Under a sky so high and wide
When it yawned, it swallowed you whole
You curled up small
Sank into those endless plains of nothing
Turned your face to the dust
And ate what you could.
It hurts less each time, you told your daughter as a comfort
Slips down your throat like a fresh-shucked oyster
You don’t even notice the taste after a while.
There’s nothing in our archives
Only your first name, a quiet imprint
Among the faded cascade of blood ties
The women in our family
Lost or unspoken
Washed away in the tide of our men.
She saw stories in a pot of tomatoes finally in fruition, the first offering after generations of destruction – the beating of the flesh, a subduing by men who cultivated customs taken from different lands.
Women, she met, taught her how to be still. To break open in daylight. To tap into a reservoir of pain repressed by a dam of generations laid like stones. What life can she have when they are released?
One day, she will wake up to a child kissing her forehead, a stillness she has known in a garden revived, and a harvest to nourish descendants walking out of her. They will learn the message she brought out in poems.
Her hands would have collected more lines in climbing trees, soaking in rivers and waterfalls, and scaling mountains. She will close her eyes and meet ancestors in the cold:
Welcome home.
Wounds that run so deep
They cause our spirit to bleed
It hurts more than life itself
Leaves us struggling to barely breathe
There’s this place deep down within
I want to reach inside there
To that darkened place
To let it out and lay it all bare
It has been lifeless and dormant
For over 100 years
Our hidden life story
Full of heartache and fear
But a call out of the blue
Sheds some much needed light
As we wade through family history
We have been given new insight
Like the pieces in a jigsaw
They all seemed to fit
And the feeling was indescribable
But we savoured every memorable bit
When the truth came to light
It drenched us in lost history
As we connected with family
Solving a 100-year mystery
Now my spirit is alight
And there’s fire in my soul
I feel it burning inside me
Protecting me, keeping me whole
I finally belong somewhere
It’s a dream come true
Being connected to lost family
Was our greatest breakthrough
Ancestry denial
the root of no tree
all thieves.
I, among them scratch
the time lost debris the family tree
and it leads me to County Kilkenny
(gee)
where a certain decree
in 1367 AD
forced English settlers to
ditch the Gaelic
and return to English
language
manners
ways of riding horses.
On Kulin land
my birth place
the colonial campaign
bolsters its relentlessness
washes it green
asks Aunty to speak for five minutes before
we orate at length about
the colonial heritage of the park
where the river
giver of all life
was rediverted
forced to subsume its network of billabongs
to make way for this here
multilevel call centre.
No doubt my blood has blood on its hands.
I cop out
focus on the Irish.
Even then boredom
the only response
to this Kilkenny discovery
Are settlers allowed that luxury?
In an age of personalisation
we’ve made our own
the Great Australian Silence
turned our network of denials
into one great channel of violence.
I return to the Birrarung.
Who travelled further in life
than water?
from blood to sky and ocean
carried everywhere
the damage we did anywhere?
Well
as in life
in death
it will make kin of you
with fungi
microbes
rotting you regardless
of creed
whatever you did in your time here
making compost of your bones
growing grasses by your grave.
you wake. your whole
body
thirsts
yourskin
is thirsty, the skin
on your face
thirsts,
and it rains
as if
you
are awindow
and rain
just
bounces
off your edges
runs
down
your pane
and you are holding
it out holding
it steady
because
in your skin
is thedust
of
stars
and the dust
is telling you that
stars
are thirsty.
Karri keep watch over mill town,
basin bulldozed of trees.
Rows of timber houses,
weatherboard and corrugated iron
corralled by closed-picket fences.
Gardens where weeds spread disorder.
On the dirt road
a family poses for a photo,
a triangle of togetherness.
Mother at the apex beams; Father,
crouched below her, beams harder.
Their children, at opposite angles,
complete the geometry.
The grinning boy in bomber jacket
counterbalances the girl. She tries on a smile
that doesn’t quite fit. It’s the new raincoat,
two sizes too large, empty sleeves
dangling to knees.
Karri guard the horizon,
waiting to recover their country.
A child wears a garment
big enough for grievances to grow into.
by the back door, little pink gumboots
a wind-chilled nose tip your accessory
the tiniest rose nub out of place
(brown snow slushies, dirty roads)
now you go clubbing
alcohol-pinked cheeks & hot strobe lights
push push pushing against your body.
from houses, street corners, I pick you up
headlight-reflected, sleep sitting
in your tired smile’s corners:
my brightest stop sign.
your seventeenth birthday & my surprise
pink vanilla dream cake
on top a wreath of tiny sugar roses:
they melt on your warm tongue. Behind,
another year of you dissolves into
a sunset-pinked October sky
and now the photo flat, / laptop screen-entrapped /
you look up at me and I look back
my heart squeezed between
the gap of then and now
how you have always been there,
little pink gumboots tracking muddy footprints
across my own life
even now, eight hundred kilometres apart
you sing me home
We planted your naval string in a pit that your father dug,
so that every Autumn we could eat sweet figs.
We broke ground with white rum
and buried your placenta with:
the clumps of hair that fell to my feet in the shower;
psalms torn from the Bible;
bissy nuts – that would mark the small of your back;
red cloth and myrrh – to run duppies;
the curl that I cut – to hold your tongue (dumb).
The doctor prescribed Escitalopram to stop me scratching holes
in all the thoughts I had (about the things we did before),
like swimming in rainy season storms,
when the grey sea swelled into a grey sky,
and sent crocodiles down Black River. Gasping saltwater –
every breath was a prayer.
Bubble wrap lungs
burst alveoli. The sea spat back:
brackish water
black spores
horsehair
black skin swollen into a bruise.
The sea stole two boys that week –
what if that was you?
(my relief when the psychologist said
that this is post traumatic stress and not something you’ll share
not something postnatal
or viral
not some antibodies
or bad-mind
for you to suckle)
Your father’s hands dug deep into Australia.
Palms cupped and offering alms,
while blackberries snaked roots
to choke
and rot
the seeds he set in old coffee cups.
Barbs pierced the cling wrap membranes,
polyethylene spilling albumin and yolk.
His fingers scratching at coal, slate, coral bones,
earthworms fed fat on micro-plastics
– labial flesh writhing as neural tubes folded –
an unhealthy liver hue.
Your own flesh (too pale)
eyes (too blue).
Your father said it was obeah –
following us across the sea.
You folded in half, and half, and half again
until you were less of him and more of me.
He wet your roots, when he wept for what we left (his kin)
and for you (his son) untied from mother-land.
The damp earth will hold you – in dry season, in pupa, in still and dim light.
This earth will hold you – until we can carry you home.
and i think of the dawn above augusta
sunrise obscured by cloud
our minds sliding straight to the easy distance of antarctica.
disappointment in the greyness disappears with rising birdsong
and sextants of light measure themselves against the inlet.
and i think how again again we would return
and never in that time lose touch with beauty.
you asked about mama only once. whose memory we’ve known
hasn’t been cutting-edge for a while, but whose memory
might never get better now. dementia, i repeat (as she does) dementia.
and dementia is like a slowly-opening tear in some fabric mama or grandma
might sew. the two parts of a brain, in this context at least, (those being
the past or memory and then of course the present or now) gradually separating,
quite bewilderingly it seems. the sufferer (the demented?) and those around
them (the demented) angry or really sad or even guilty. stricken by whatifs. but
that is nothing to the fear of the person with the illness. it creeps and sneaks and
then the guillotine. Mama’s handwriting decline scares her and papa tells her
no i won’t repeat it you should have written it down but she has and just
wanted clarification. or jesus you should be ashamed because i’m visiting
and have to finish cooking dinner because she has filled all the pots
but doesn’t know with what. and there is decline in overall cognitive
ability with more gaps total but the silk tears too and tears fall easy.
soon stories of memoryfamily are easier to recall than what in the name of
was i doing? but i sit with her and The Sky Runs Right Through Us by
the estuary. she, in this place of mostly memory, with focus and calm and
mirrorwater moments, constructs novel readings and says the word incongruous
with only a little time in the recall, so the present re-threads a little. she stands
and points and we yell SHIP AHOY to a catamaran cutting south and we wave
our arms and i’m a little self-conscious for less than a moment because WE LAUGH
oh we do. until the kangaroos appear with the big boomer and she is
shocked back to confusion and a little fear. and worries that she should be
cleaning or cooking so edges by the razor- reeds and steps again inside to move
papers back and forth and write shaky dinnerplans in smudged pencil.
and i feel the sting of memory also, of when i would tease aunty j, mama’s
sister, who had alzheimer’s. she was ten years older than mama and the
family brought her over from Melbourne when she was diagnosed. she
would come to birthdays or Christmas from her (fancy but bleach-scented
nonetheless) nursing home and we’d give presents. i’d say happy birthday
many times and she would always reply is it my birthday? and the
table would chuckle but also tell me to stop. and i wish i had. because for
aunty j the rip was widening and the two minds splitting such that she
remembered the names of her Melbourne cats but not her carers and,
suddenly, not even Mama. because she didn’t know her as this dignified
silver-haired old lady, but only then as a child and young woman
in photographs she was shown to remind her that i’m rosemary don’t
you remember? and then she had a stroke and her minds tore
entirely, and Mama’s a little more. and dementia is such that,
eventually, it’s all (and less) past and no now.
I am not of this place
and yet, I keep returning
we spoke of the past
but I do not lay claim to it
how can one know
that of which
they do not belong
we spoke of the past
and I held it in my hand
seventeen centuries it lay
deep
in
the
ploughed
and furrowed
Earth
a tool
a utensil
a weapon
awe of history
and respect for the crushing
weight of time
brought us to the brink
of unbidden tears
I am not of this place
and yet, I sigh in relief
upon returning
a can’t believe it’s true?
a couldn’t have really happened?
I di e died here.
I di e dead here
a something horrendous?
a something unspeakable?
Hear that?
Rumbling downunder.
Thundering upover.
Feel that?
Quake. Quaking. Wake. Waking.
Anyone else finding it hard to breathe?
breath sharing breath
sharing breath
breath
breathe
This, is something else.
Something else, this is.
reaching to, a reaching from, a reaching from, a reaching to, reaching foward, reaching back
re mber re e y e ember mem ry rem ber remem re memory remember remember
Layered upon
upon
upon
Yes, yes. It’s a University now.
What was it before?
Awaking. A waking.
Awakening.
A w a k e n.
I’m desperate to ask someone who’ll know.
Shit, out of luck in this tomb of a place.
I’m desperate to see someone who’ll know.
Mana whenua e, kai hea koutou? Kai hea tatou ma? 2
Aglow with the faces of her mob, a Sister Lands.
E te tuahine3, what is this place? a can’t believe
it’s true? a couldn’t have really happened, a
something horrendous? a something
unspeakable?
Ka mate nga tangata whenua i kōnei ne ha?4
Our stories the same but, not. Our stories the same. But. Not. Our stories the same. But. Not.
whisper, whispering whispers whisper, whispering whispers whisper, whispering whispers
love, loving the loves.
sad, sadding the sads.
whisper, whispering whispers, whispering whispers, whispering whispers, whispering.
ears trembling with song.
mouth trembling with sing.
bones jangling, jangle em bones
here/there / there/ here/ here/ hear
every where
Sista, do you really want to know?
Tell me.
The walls of this building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The
walls of this building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The walls
of this building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The walls of this
building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The walls of this
building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The walls of this
building is mixed with the bones of the Original Peoples of this Land. The walls of this build.
Walls. Building. Bones. Peoples.
Building. Bones. Peoples.
Bones. Peoples.
Peoples bones.
And. We’ve. Been. Eating. In. Here.
here/ here
everywhere
OurstoriesthesamebutnotOurstoriesthesamebutnotOurstoriesthesamebutnotOurStoriesthesa
Straya’s always nek level
me. Not. Ourstoriesthesame. Not. Ourstoriesthesame. Not. Our stories the same. Not. Our
Fair go, Kiwi’s no diff’rent mate.
Storiesthesame. Our Stories the same.
Our. Stories. The.
Same.
Auē! Auē! Taukiri ē! 5
Sister, I should have greeted you, Sister, I should have greeted you,
with hongi. with hongi.
Sister. You did.
Sister, I should have greeted
you with hongi.
My Sister. We did
Under clammy loam past the roots
of Bodhi trees, in a place the ancestors
named Colombo
lie the bones from which
we came, you and I. Think of the mariner gone
two centuries, stowed in the damp of someone else’s
gouged earth, landlocked for eternity,
the owners of the place where he disembarked
hurling dirt
on the change he’d brought, gathered like dark pillars
on the fringe
of a Christian burial for a tragic Billy Budd,
our great, great, great, etcetera, all bravado
and natural curiosity, a genealogist’s conundrum;
his legend mocks documentation, his archaic sextant
condemned to a musty life in the sea-bitten tea chest
that adorns your mantlepiece, a salt-damaged relic of
expired wanderlust. Think of his marrow, small red specks
dotting the verdant fringe of Negombo, the nucleotides
that grew our generations. Imagine our long-expired grandmothers
who landed swan-necked, vulnerable as seabirds on the docks,
to marry, to cobble nests among the jam fruit trees, to dodge
cobras; the scrape of coral reef on merchant hulls, their rite
of passage. Unmoored now, we roll like egret eggs,
you and I, in different directions,
far from the sea;
the art of navigation sunk within, dormant, unfathomable,
the distance between us, vast.
lots of histories
some that made it to her story
trickle
trickle
trick
le
she holds up the hems of her skirt to collect the moods of her ancestors
she loses her brother to a missile that hits the sunroom
a piece of it lodged in her calf
she weds a man she loves
lives the life she’s been taught dreaming of easy days
she fills the pockets of my pink snow coat with nuts and dry fruit
almonds to keep you warm
she swallows the rock in her throat at the airport waiting for answers
her home and her people on the other side of earth
she attends her mother’s funeral via long distance calls
her grief sticking to the walls of the home she’s built on stolen land
she dreams of her mother picking an onion out of her breast
the biopsy disagrees and the chemo takes her eyebrows
she forces her hand to sign divorce papers while her children hold her weeping body
she must live days made up of her fears
i’m weary after another battle with chemicals set off by the memory in my body
she makes me mantoo
noshe jaan jiggeram
History is coiled in my cells
from this land, land beyond sea
black loch, coarse heather, farmed croft, a wooden boat.
German burial of an Australian airman
jack boots and red segments of flag
emptiness absorbs Bealiba station.
In my blood, claimed land stolen by an imperial greed
a shredded testament
dust of the First People, rocks and sheep
fleece of prosperity, wild river, dwindling bush.
Coastal salt spray of Port Melbourne
oily rainbows, red bricks, sheet metal, passing ships.
Tradesman, minister, the glitter
of sapphire, diamond and gold rings.
New Hebrides mid-wife, missionary.
Seymour, droplets of the Goulbourn River.
I am the dead, the dying.
Gippsland, Moe, a village in France
sawn wood, hammer, handmade squares and plane
living in a tent, generations before I was born
the fire that razed their house, plentiful bush.
Great grandfather walking into the dam
his damage flowing from grandmother to mother to me.
Running creek past the dairy, her cows
and paddocks, orchids picked, passing train
memories my mother no longer can retrieve.
My history jagged fragments.
I am the living, from the silence I speak.
climbing
At first, below, it’s just bush,
the coarse darkness of unreckoned terrain.
This the history of all stories,
or the breath between them
where new ones are framed.
cruising altitude
The scrub falters at the bounds of farmland,
snags against the smooth tapestry of horticulture
where the seeds of urban backstories are sown.
Page after page of cultivation is drawn,
a study in fluid verdancy with small-town geometries
etched in juxtaposition. Here,
where narratives meet and plots begin to change,
a highway staples the scene like the spine of a picture book.
mild turbulence
Mountains rear and a river spills, mercurial
in the virgin light, leaking through the folds
so it seems each valley holds shards of the sky.
A glimpse of our shadow reveals two narratives concurrent,
context and plot-point aligned, until cloud blooms
and we can no longer read the land.
The disconnect is unsettling, focus narrowing on narrator,
but when sunlight glints on the wing of another plane,
I realise the clouds are full of people;
that the sky, too, is woven with tales.
descent
We breach the cloud floor
and are summoned by green. This is home,
the land, not a conclusion but a remembering
that while our stories may not all fit the same pages,
they are all being written on the same country.
Here, in the city streets of Chennai where I reside planting few seeds for future, I know few sounds branding the difference. Early mornings, a bicycle peddles, selling ‘idiyappams’, which my grandmother made effortlessly. He taking long breaths, between, idi and appam, gulping the grammar of merging. The tailor, with his machine on wheels, rolling over the roads, following a cry sound of ‘eup-eup’, he calls out to the mistresses of the apartments, for their mystic appearances. Then, few vendors who mend sofa, stove, the menders who follow the tailors, the buyers of silk, the worshippers of Sai Baba (Saturday special) marking their morning routines. So much of mending to be done in the morning, stitching the void open wounds of a homeland belonging. Afternoon and the balmy evenings witness no vendors much, occasional bicycle walas and northern survivors selling clothes, they don’t ring bells, they never shout either, like how us – the re-habited city dwellers move in quietness to our apartments. By late evening, the man on his bicycle returns with his idiyappams, closing the curtains of the day, for a sweet night’s sleep. All through summer, winter, monsoon like the warmth, that forgets to leave in this heat trapped city, these sounds stay, on roll, yearlong, reminding us what we miss! And to belong to either of the places, I failed, I know! to belong, the ultimate quest, to requite I guess.
in a tent pitched in a corner of the deck
you lit wax candles
soaked sponges with liquor
infused hot water with chamomile and hartshorn
pointed her to the stool
held it still while she
squatted and her
baby, through gravity, dropped, slimy, into your hands
ignoring the burn playing in the space between warmth and
fire travelling along your inner
wrist, you listened to her eyes, lifted water to her lips, pressed
sponge to brow for
centuries, back on land, you’d answered to the church letting them
know if any mother had killed their child or
conducted a heathen ritual with their placenta
here, far from surveillance and steeples, you
helped my ancestors
return to what the doctor called
a ‘natural state of good health’1 as if
nature might be separate from knowledge from
sponge from tendon
A woman moves in-between homes
homes that own her.
Her body is not
even her own
Home.
My body
Once upon a time before me and my sister’s time
love was an arrangement
The men of my family
were wedded to their land
before they married their wives.
While my mother, grandmother and the mothers before them
were wedded to an endless motherhood.
“You have a mother’s body”
they told us everyday
So learn to care
learn to nourish
practice everyday
to pour your love in others vessel.
He’ll build a house for you
brick by brick
the walls are to be painted by you
your kids will call it home.
Together you’ll save them.
But you alone will mother them,
The house, the husband and the kids.
Because “you have a mother’s body”
It’s always someone’s home.
In the backseat
of the lime green holden gemini
I sat in just my undies, pudgy pale
flesh folding under sunny skies
with the windows rolled down
in January school holidays.
Mum told me about the mission,
being Kamilaroi,
her mums siblings,
the girls school
and the blood shed
and all she knew.
When I’m older
details fill in gaps,
explicit pain piles
events contextualised
and deeds left by dead
turn into hell
no time can
heal over
hour long
phone call crises between
city and Country.
I used to visit her
in her cottage by the sea;
my grandmother.
She spun silky stories
of a creature some had seen
and one that swam in streams.
It spoke in storms,
a spirit of the ages
cast away
into sunken seas.
Seal coat
night eyes,
ancient foe in amorous disguise.
There was always a golden comb
in her hands –
those brown, leathery hands
hands
the colour of mahogany,
and palms
palms as white as the shells on the shore.
Beware, my child,
of that creature on the rocks;
when tides ride low
she combs her locks.
Take heed, my child
of that creature on the rocks,
luring Freetown’s fishermen
from their docks.
And if my child, you must seek land
beware of the one that extends his hand.
I never saw that creature on the rocks
but I could always feel it
dwelling
in the crevices of my memory.
Vegemite on toast is what the locals eat around here.
not sure we can call ourselves that, with our lack
of pantry. a few shelves of Home Brand basics:
my childhood. sometimes news in the morning.
toast is what my father started eating as dessert
when he could afford a toaster. a luxury, he
called it. guess that’s why it was dessert. Мама
would never touch it. she used to visit the Russian
supermarket when it was still open. guess it’s not
needed anymore. i remember the store in Melbourne
where Папа used to buy me глазированный сырки. don’t Google
Translate that. doesn’t sound too appetising in English.
toast is what we became when Папа lost his job
some years later. by then all the Русские supermarkets had
been declared redundant, like him. guess we’re expected to
assimilate. forget our old comforts and eat Vegemite
on toast. last month Мама cried when her friend
sent us a box brimming with Русские sweets. i sat alone
in the corner nibbling on toast. Мама told me to speak,
to smile. the dry crust scraped my throat tongueless.
