Who knows how long this can continue,

this tenure in the future through collective presents.

Whatever the generations bring,

there will be totems of the past

fixed firmly insistent in each of our minds,

arrayed with faces carved in the hard woods

that only family trees produce

and set, sometimes poles apart, in the family grove.

 

These are some of mine.

 

 Children growing themselves from new numbers each year,

all named and loved and parented in common for a day

with tear-filled eyes, chocolate-coated faces and grinny cheeks,

each hoisted to embrace and admiration,

all feats applauded and all false pride mocked.

 

Food, prepared as sanctioned by time,

in unspoken, ordained ritual by the women,

the bearers of all sustaining life.

 

Men, surrounded by seemingly unobservant boys,

using beer to shorten stretching distances,

quietly competing every hurdle

until a child clings to a leg

and wins.

 

Lives past, sitting patiently in reserved and sacred chairs,

coming back to life in anecdotes

of bastardry and joy.

 

Toddlers and crawlers, excited and bewildered,

knee-deep in wrapping paper and parental nostalgia.

 

Babes at breast, absorbing every nuance

through the pores of their clan skin

and the memories encoded in their mother’s milk.

 

The married-ins, belonging in their separateness

to this caravan, as hopeful and as helpless

as those that followed a certain star

but at least knowing for whom they bear their gifts.

 

And, amidst all, the matriarch unfolds a pattern

and, with skills both ancient and subtle,

draws to her strands unknitted,

in case they ever unravel

and pull the fabric apart.

 

These are my totems, taking firmer shape with each year,

and living beyond any other presents shared.

And they ensure that all our futures

will have at least one day

not alone.

I woke at dawn to re-design our house,

my life,

the organised world

and all who sail in her.

I asked the dawn-bird,

as the only stakeholder in attendance,

to add his thoughts to the Situation Analysis.

Unthrilled and shrill,

he snapped tight his sticky beak

and was unforthcoming,

indifferent

and unmindful of my learning.

I thanked him for the familiar experience.

 

Free at last,

I plotted endless variations

on new children’s tales,

featuring Little Miss Shenanigans,

and her parents, Dreadful and Shameless,

a farter and burper, respectively.

Granted a wish by a leprechaun,

the Little Miss curses her progenitors

with the appearance of a wombat and an emu, respectively,

at each impolite expulsion.

 

Thus, I funned myself to sleep

and woke up to myself,

hoping I’d not slept too long.

For my wife, Sue

 

So, just deserts it will be.

Whines will not become water.

There will be no Selling Houses Australia’s of rain to make-over summer.

The trees will be her cathedral-ceiling Grand Designs.

The Amazing Spaces will be in her mind.

If she cannot have abundance,

she will have succulence.

‘Twas ever thus

and ever it shall be

that, from clouds of poverty,

she will make it rain love.

She will raise her green children

as she has raised all her children,

with every faltering step a giant stride

through her Rosie-coloured glasses.

Still ‘crazy’ after all these years.

 

For my wife, Sue

 

Everything is Rosie in the garden

The touch of her hand is everywhere

covering all the ground

nurturing the native

gathering in the orphan

weeding out the evil

feeding the strugglers

watering the thirsty

tough-loving the growth

leaving space

weaving magic

sewing hope

visioning dreams

picturing flight

staking the future

creating legacy

building the earth

and loving the lost.

In the outer suburbs, in the space between the bush and the town,

therapy is what you get from a physio.

When the cracks appear in the plaster

and they start to match up with your mind,

because the foundations have slipped,

you ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls

because it never tolls for thee.

 

In the silence you can hear Death whispering

and your GP says ‘take these’.

You scream at the TV and the three-piece suite

and the made-to-measure lined drapes,

‘I invested in you, where is my dividend?’

And these things scream back their nothing response.

 

Your children, who abandoned your church

tell you to take up yoga and your mouth says ‘yes’

and your heart says ‘is that all there is?’

You’ve played the game

and did what you had to do

and you come to the end

and your kids feed you mumbo jumbo they’ve picked up

with the education that cost your world to give,

their clever minds and dumb hearts deaf to your rhythms and your reality.

 

You wish to God your own parents had owned up to this swindle

and that you could stop counting the ghosts

that fill in the gaps in the queue of your past people.

 

And that your grandchildren knew more about you

than your bottomless pit of little presents.

And that that bastard who mows his lawns at 7 a.m. on Sundays

would stop without having to be asked.

 

And that any of it made any sense.

And that everything would just stop for a while

while you get your bearings

so that you could know …….. not everything

but just one thing that you were sure was true

for now and for ever

instead of watching the cracks spreading

in all of the plaster.

And what are we?

 

Are we numbly loose-lipped and post-prandial

on full-bellied summer Sundays,

raising one more delicious inconsequence

before a snores-pause?

 

Are we strokers and pokers

skilled in orificial correspondence

set to midnight music?

 

Are we combat-ready for the blood-letting

of nights at the round table,

at ease with full-fired intellect and born again bullshit

delivered in the self-same breath?

 

Are we wanderers in temples of tree and stone

in the familiar and foreign,

building ourselves from the known and unknown

with equal reverence

in the blinding dark?

 

Or are we dead-safe?

Sated, superannuated, deflated

in a wait-for-age handicap

over the mortgage distance,

constantly withdrawing options from the hole in the wall

of Life?

 

We, the refugees,

are in danger of retreat from the siege on the City of Doubt,

of being drunk on the poison of ambition,

of cloning our self-encumbered view,

of belief in ever-libidinous loins,

of living a well-rehearsed death.

 

Now, as we stand on the edge

of the Chasm of Indecision,

do we build safety bridges across the leaping flames

or do we take leaps of faith,

fearing Death will cheat delay?

 

Or do we set up camp

and wait for the Lotto results?

 

And for which will we love ourselves the most?

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.