I wrote this as a social worker for a government welfare agency in the 90’s. I doubt much has changed.

Dear ‘Bring Back The Lash’ of Burnside,

What is it that you want us to do?

To witness for the children

(who live with the ‘monsters’

that dwell in the mysteries

of mythical ‘other’ suburbs)

while saving the Family?

 

To seek remorse from the children

of beating, beaten fathers

for spraying your walls

like strutting, rutting tomcats

prowling your memory lanes?

 

To firmly guide the child-mother

to the double-breasted state,

in the secret hope of confiscation

of the child-father’s heir

for replanting in the middle ground?

 

To guide the steps of the dispossessed

to the paths of committee righteousness

where the swords of primal anger

can be beaten into submissions,

the ploughshares of the damned?

 

To muffle black voices

and stumble into families

two hundred years in the breaking

and steal back their youth’s Dreaming

at two hundred k’s an hour?

 

To hear your rage in silence

as you birch us for our weakness

and hang us from the headlines,

while the raiders of the lost recession

brief QC’s from Majorca?

 

As we stumble to the millennium

doing more tricks with less,

we scan the darkness of your charity

and our own wounded, winding road

for a light to guide us home.

Written for my mother on her 70th birthday.

She stands, but not still.

Stubborn,

all-embracing,

worrying,

doing,

chastising,

remembering,

surviving,

loving God

by loving the rest of us

more than we deserve.

No-one dies while she lives to remember.

Jack will go on ‘killing’ the cow.

Stella will still walk two miles to the cemetery and three back.

Billy will grin under that sailor’s cap.

Kath will give cheek to the world.

Joyce’s fag will defy gravity while she laughs her love.

And a young bloke, too handsome for a girl’s good,

will walk down a Coburg aisle, in a uniform

from an unfinished war

and take the girl from Ky, forever.

At three score and ten, she is the keeper of the time keys

and now her children live in the rings of her still growing tree.

Lorraine lives with her in Mt. Gambier rooms.

This boy returns from the dead to get lost in long grass.

Denise plays permanently sun-dressed in Darwin heat.

For ourselves, we believe we are other people now.

She is less sure

and watches for tell-tale signs in her grandchildren,

who are equally certain of their unique place in the universe

but who carry their grandparents into the new millennium,

not as a burden but a marked trail

in case they ever lose their way.

 

She is all time and all time is now.

She stands, but not still.

In the beginning were the words

and the words were printed in ‘The Age’

and the words became a deed of sale

for a piece of unbuggered bush

in the bush-be-buggered country.

And the sale became a track,

a shack,

a dog and two cats,

and two city runaways

confident that ignorance would see them through.

And the ignorance became a nightmare

that rained forever,

was always delivered late,

broke down as soon as you were broke

and sacked you the first day the sun shone.

But the sun did shine

and the sunshine became foundations

and the mud and the sand and the straw became

bricks

and the bricks became belief

and belief became relief,

as the even bricks stacked up the odds

in favour of home,

where the hearth is,

for a dog and two cats and two country rebels,

who began with words,

bought a dream,

learned through lack of knowledge,

huddled together in pig-headed defiance of adversity,

danced in the sunshine

and made bricks and laid bricks

to live within their own shelter from the storm.

In the beginning they were impulsive,

in the middle they were insane.

At the end they are resolutely and incorrigibly

themselves

and they live on the only road

that leads to home.

 

This piece won a Highly Commended citation at the Deniliquin Writers Festival in 1994. The judges commended it for “its humorous demythologising of an urban-country movement evident these days. Nicely shaped too.”

In 1995, Mary McKillop was Beatified, a step along the arcane road to her eventual sainthood in 2010 (a first for an Australian) in the magical realist world that is the Catholic Church. I wrote this for a Josephite nun (the order that Mary started) on her ‘marriage’ to God, to remind her not much had changed since Mary’s time..

You have your own poor

amidst your own wealth,

no less distant

from short-arm jabs

and handouts from the deep pockets of their own stolen goods.

 

You have your own wordless

asleep in your library,

no less hungry

for a roadside snack

while thumbing a ride on the information super-highway.

 

You have your own ‘orphans’

surrounding your family,

no less abandoned

than refugees,

distantly disguised by the soft focus of history.

 

You have your own excommunicated,

the ‘disappeared’ in your community,

no less denied

for their difference

when you send in the clones.

 

You have your own bureaucrats

framing your love of God,

no less certain

in their knowledge

than a hundred years ago.

 

At the end,

there is no more life left to tell

but your own,

saintly in its endless beginnings.

“We instinctively reach out to those who work with us on creating meaning.  Those who give voice and form to our search for meaning, and who help us to make our life purposeful, are those we cherish, and to whom we return gift for gift.”  Margaret J. Wheatley – ‘Leadership and the New Science’

“The perfection of your art lies in the difficult region between the heart’s intent and the expression of this intent in gesture.  Practice your forms in peace.  You have done better than you think.”  Tai Chi teaching

For Damian Lacey

Scoop the stream

and drink from the well-spring that is your life’s work

and rise refreshed to continue the journey.

Press the sky,

keeping at bay the thunder that lives in emptiness

and the lightning disguise of the void.

Draw strongly on the bow of the Shaolin Archer

to protect your left/right, yin/yang, husband/father, new/old

and honour each when each is in need.

Search the clouds

for the mirrors beyond

so you will always have a Fool to make you laugh.

Lift the rock

that is your faith and let your eyes follow its path,

lowering them only when the test is over.

Touch the sky and press the earth

to bring heaven meekly to the world

where the earth-inheritors dwell.

Use the eye of the tiger

to show the world you know what lies behind you

each time you choose to pounce.

Grip the swallow’s egg

keeping all that is precious

safe within your mortal shield.

and each day,

Bow to the light that is in you

knowing that it touched me as I passed you

on my zig zag pathway home.

 

For my Mum and Dad’s 50th wedding anniversary

Something must have been there

through fifty summers of heat haze,

sunburn itching against bedclothes,

fear feeding off smoke in the nostrils

and eating salads at dusk.

 

Something must have been there

through fifty autumns of leaf mulch,

weak sun fighting the descending cool,

watching the first football sail over the fence

and surrendering to a fire.

 

Something must have been there

through fifty winters of grey wet,

clothes damp-steaming on horses,

darkness enclosing work, to and fro,

and soup-and-toasting Sundays.

 

Something must have been there

through fifty years of spring treachery,

winter’s skeleton dressed in summer clothes,

frost-bitten life triumphing over fading death

and all things seeming possible.

 

Something must have been there,

through fifty years of seasons sweet and bitter,

settling differences through closeness and separation,

learning life is not a line but a circle

and, in the end, you are beginning again.

 

You have the rest of your life

to tell each other what it was,

and is,

starting now.

Memories,

carefully dusted off and swathed,

packed in the boxes

along with the more trivial possessions.

Like the apocryphal cat

they can’t be left behind.

Some you will unpack immediately upon arrival

as handy conversation pieces when old friends call.

Some will remain encased

with only an occasional furtive private inspection

to check for silverfish and mildew.

And some will be ‘forgotten’,

but will only feign death

and, like ancient terracotta soldiers,

will wait in infinite patience

ready to ambush the present.

 

To begin to begin means beginning to end

the lives lived through others,

the boundaries of love,

the self-graven image,

the down-town face,

the magazine body,

the standard-gauge line,

the next logical step,

the leadership of the lost,

the mantle of the Madonna,

the leg-irons of the country,

the glister of the city,

the waiting for Death,

the defining of Life,

the stroking of guilt,

the denial of pride

and, the first journey.

The second journey may begin at

the Stations of the Cross,

the point of no return,

the height of absurdity,

the depths of despair

or the horizon of friendship.

To begin is to print your own poetic licence

and to drive on whatever side of the road

you damn well please.

We are all cut men.

Cut from our mother’s chord,

with its threat to strangle us beyond the womb

or tie us to a cleaner version of ourselves

for sisterly consumption.

Cut from our father’s dream for us,

our failures punished with word and hand,

our mother-love is on the list

of unforgivable treacheries.

 Cut from our partner’s love,

with its evolving, slippery conditions

fashioned in childhood and femolution

and guilting our own evolution, as if wilfully chosen.

 Cut from true fatherhood

by Hollywood fantasia

and the crushing weight on the balls

of our selfish, restless feet.

And cut from each other

by the spun-glass phallusies of prowess

and the trashing of our historical domains

and the fear of being fucked in the arse.

We are all cut men

and our lack of healing will be the death of us.