Disparities
with Maureen 

I am sleeping in your sweet Leitrim air.
Clouds of summer rain will gather,
day ahead calm and lightly wet,
enough to prompt the red, purple and
saffron flowers in your window boxes
into extra depth of colour, adding
a bright polish only rain can give.

Near Titanic, we learn, in a vastness of sea,
an ocean of such deepness creatures need
their own light systems, Titan, a capsule bolted
shut from the outside with sixteen metal locks,
is lost. Wanting adventure, four wealthy people
and one son, Suleman Dawood, 19, sit, momentarily,
we think, under the great salty press.

Trapped, measuring their small breaths,|
eeking out thinning oxygen, edging panic away,
tapping methodically each thirty minutes,
we imagine their slow last silence.
Now news it was all fools’ hope.
‘Implosion’, such a rich word, a rapid crush,
gasped last breath forced into short bubbles.

Meanwhile, crowded from view by 4,000 miles
and a multinational rescue effort for the five;
seven hundred people desperately squeezed
onto Adriana, a leaking boat, are sinking
close to Greece. Their desire is only for refuge.
Mohamed Ahmad, 18, a Syrian son lost, hoped for
work, his photo embedded in his mother’s phone.

One boat, from Greece, shadowed the coming
moments. Inexplicable. Nothing is fast there.
He feels their boat capsize, planks splitting, slowly,
surrounded by the drowning, some sinking voiceless,
some with the fervour of thrashing hope,
their memories of bright rain-dusted flowers
totally absent, facing their grave end.

 **

Masquerade

Bitter black in my mouth,
iron melting through limbs,
the creamy froth tips into lip memory.
Each vein of me trails along home places.

Outside the green is pretending it knows me.
But crêpe myrtle bulging, leaf-loaded, drooping
heavy with flower, cerise, pink and mauve
in January, give the place away.

The pub is small. The Snug a curl of the familiar.
Local footballers’ photos crowd the walls
beside an ‘Irish poem’, one of those terrible ditties
on Irish mothers. There are mirrors, lamp-lit.

Brass fittings fabricate age. This Guinness is on tap
and a true taste. But there’s an edge of deception.
It’s made here. Looking up for a pressed ceiling above,
the eye is plastered with naked women.

Trickster memory. This is not Ireland.

 **

Travelling Lost, Still

Unaware that history twists us, leaving Errislannan
for Waterford to read, I was keen for the drive,
and I had thought to go back the way I came.
But then, I hadn’t known it would be this road.

Past Miss O’Neill’s where she held court
selectively in her front room bar with her sleepy
fireside cat; where we drank privately, my freesias
for her sinning their colour as if over-ripe.
As we were. But they are both long dead now.

Past Pallas Green, the restaurant where we shared
apple pie and ice cream after dinners, as lovers do,
you’d say. Then the turn off to Cappamore and Murroe,
the lane chosen that started the whole thing,
seasons of doubt and burning, thirty-six years since.

Sweeping past the road to your Abbey door, memory
veers off along the trail of those times. That old,
too-familiar longing rises, breathy, scorching as hot ash.
And our last meeting, three years past. Holding me, and
your last kiss, I stupidly thought, I can do this as friendship.

Lost, with the road to Lismore suddenly small,
I’m swimming through larch trees exploding
with green, arching, a woman’s arch in love
her man rising above and the tall branches
a balance of holding the light in and out of the road.

Upwards above the Glen of Aherlow, vivid patchwork,
a map of differences unlikely to be unfenced, past those
Galtee mountains we climbed, you baking in desire,
lizard on a hot rock and the ache in me for you searing.
And still I’m thinking, I’ll take this road back.

Then Béal Lough in the Vee, where water goes in
but it never comes out. A black mirror where the ghost
of Petticoat Loose rises to catch swimmers,
Mary Hannigan, who dared to be different and was
called out as a witch. There are many burnings.

Elder flower a cream smother of grief, then glorious,
glorious weed, mauve rhododendron, bursts all over
the valley, up the mount, years of it growing invasive
like some love; thickly beautiful it makes flesh hunger to
roll in it, an animal need to be covered, skin soaking it in.

Thinking I might arrive home smiling with memory
after the long journey back, not burning myself white
with gin for two days, I had thought to take the same
road back. But I hadn’t known it would be this road.

**

Dreaming History on Merdivenli Street
for Sinan and Seçil , Bozcaada

Your house is set in a small harbour of land.
Red and green lights at the front steps
mark its own port and starboard, safe haven
from restaurants, crowds, cafes, squeezed into
the elbow of this small street, steep stair alley,
shown clearly on the oldest maps here.

It sits calmly between tall hotels, gazing
directly out at the Venetian castle that seems
to float on the back bay lapping.
Its limestone walls at night shine a strange
subtle amber as if the small creatures forever
captured in stone lend light towards us in the dark.

Persians, Venetians, Ottomans, Greek and Turkish,
naval conquerors built two castles and razed them,
built villages, and demolished them too.
Barren in dark times, bright sun in others
once the town was more divided into Greek and
Turkish ‘quarters’ by a river with six bridges.

Now the difference is between house shapes,
colours. Two cultures fell in and out of
friendships here, swung back and forth,
in a history of peace-wrangling.
Bozcaada is a village in constant remaking.
Burned or knocked down, it reinvents itself.

Builders carry red tiles up and down our hill
dust is everywhere. I wonder, is it marble
crushed from dug up roads ready for new pipes,
or the same soil that Bronze Age feet crushed,
double headed axes found in the hills behind.
Once, Greeks waited in the other harbour for Troy.

Oddly, an urgency to find roots for this house
has seized me, seeing your photos of rebuilding,
restoring, and the blurry shot of an old woman here.
Also perhaps, born out of my living this side of
the village for the first time in my ten years coming,
now nearer the church bells than the muezzin’s call.

That photo is Katerina Çolak. She lived here once.
It’s all I can find. I scour old maps carefully saved
by Harkan in the museum, read Turkish books,
struggling with ways to translate; photograph
old and broken walls, slats of timber supports
between the stones; rickety chimneys fire-blackened.

Where is the building that held the grain, the flour?
The Greek father of Mrs Antula carted it down
the hill on his donkey from windmill to storage,
small blips in an old black and white photo. In sepia
Katerina sits outside this very house. There are low
stone fences, outside walls peeling their poverty surface.

Upstairs, the traditional Greek oriel window was a
leaning bay of battered timber, irregular crooked slats.
Further into the village these windows still protrude
over alleys, giving space where houses are small,
leaning towards each other across narrow streets,
flowerboxes spilling scarlet geraniums, deep pink roses.

Her name in Greek means ‘pure, clean, clear’; but
her married name is Turkish, ‘one armed, crippled arm’.
What brought that union? My hope is love.
She looks tired, but upright. She has spectacles
that might be ‘cat eyes’ from the 50s, upturned rims.
Not young, her breasts are heavy to the waist.

Her loose headscarf speaks of obligation rather than
commitment. She is not dressed for work, as other
women will be that day, gathering to knit with island
wool, seated in the streets to labour as poor women
always have, exchanging news, the cost of food.
I wonder is she ready to leave? Why the photograph?

I stare at the walls from my bed upstairs. Their story
presses itself through the cool cement, intriguing,
complex patterns seem to come from stone shapes behind,
lines like maps or hieroglyphics I have no code for.
At night the waves lull, licking at castle foundations,
reminiscent of sleep songs by the sea at my father’s house.

Stairs curve up towards me like the inside of an old
lighthouse. At night the timber ceiling creaks, as if
it’s a boat at sea. The house seems to crackle,
undulate softly, rippling. I know the rescued canon balls
heavy beside the fireplace below will anchor us.
I’m weary of looking for the story here, and what does it matter?

Letting go of a past, long-forgotten, brings me back into
this day’s late beauty. Collections of beach gifts – shells, coral,
tackle, an old propeller – mosaic a story of new owners.
Collecting driftwood, Sinan made skeleton fish for walls,
hung shell, bell, nazar under ship lamps beside the chimney.
He folds his family into the island, into this houseboat of light.

Opening the door on dusk, I sit on the stone terrace
silently listening to wave-wash on the pebbled
beach below. Sweet spirit-scent, wild honeysuckle,
drifts sinuous. Not one soft voice breaks into the
sense of time continuing and still. A breeze blows
salt into my lungs, intimating heartbeat inside the air.

 

Nazar: eye-shaped design in deep blues and white, to protect against the evil eye.
Bozcaada Island has had many Greek (Tenedos) and non-Greek names. Currently, ,Boz (barren, ada island), yet vineyards have always grown here. As the island passed back and forth between Turkey and Greece, most of the Greek families have migrated, often to Australia.

 ————————————-

These poems first appeared in P76 Issue 8. A few copies of the initial print run are available at Rochford Cottage Bookshop for $20. They are destined to become collectors items.

Robyn Rowland, an Irish-Australian citizen, has been living between Ireland and Victoria for over 30 years, and working in Turkey since 2009. In December 2019 she returned to NSW, caring for her father who died 2 years later at 102. She has 14 books, 11 of poetry, most recently Under This Saffron Sun – Safran Güneşin Altında, (Knocknarone Press, Ireland 2019) and This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (FIP, 2015; repub. Spinifex Press, Australia, 2018), bilingual with Turkish translations by Mehmet Ali Çelikel. Mosaics from the Map came out in 2018 (Doire Press, Ireland). She has won or been listed for various prizes and awarded Australia Council and CAL grants. Robyn’s poetry appears in national/international journals in 9 countries, over forty-five anthologies, and eight editions of Best Australian Poems and in Being Human, ed. Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2011). A selection of her work also appeared in Rochford Street Review. She has read in India, Portugal, Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, and is published in translation. She is filmed reading for the National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, UCD, available on YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-gzWdQlBEE. An extensive interview with Denise O’Hagan appeared in The Blue Nib December 2020 https://denise-ohagan.com/robyn-rowland-in-conversation-with-denise-ohagan/. Further information is on https://robynrowland.com/

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