All Things

By | 1 November 2012
Persephone

How can I tell her, my own mother,

that I long for the autumn to turn?

When I first take his seeds upon my tongue

I gag, but soon I swallow them with ease.

The earth swallows me in turn.

The bright world fades, means nothing.

I give it scant thought.


Demeter

I am your mother.

What else can I do but wait?

Though I gnaw at the branch

of the tree outside my room

which bears no fruit,

until my gums are bleeding.

Will nothing hasten your return

or the tree’s first shoots of green?

I have waited out more winter days

than I care to count.

I wring my hands until the bones grate,

my menses cease with the seasons

and only death to all things

will quell my nerves.
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Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press), won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award. This book was also shortlisted for four other national awards: the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Stella Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and, as a manuscript, for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press), was shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. In 2011 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the U.S. and the U.K. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. Her new poetry collection, South in the World (UWA Publishing) will be released later this year (2014). She lives in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

http://www.lisajacobson.org

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