Making Sorties into the Unknown: Brook Emery launches Tide by Ivy Ireland

The Birth of the Universe

Once everything
was nothing but darkness
that didn’t yet know it was darkness
and also, apparently, hydrogen
that didn’t yet know it was hydrogen
because it hadn’t collided with itself
enough to make light –
enough to make the dark known.

We know it all, now. We know we are
an ancient flock of star remains,
the by-product of hydrogen bombs,
something from nothing and returning there again,
and still we’re able to get out of bed,
drive to the grocery store before the kids wake up
to collect the milk we forgot to pick up
on the way home from work last night.
This is miracle, this is some holy vow
we can’t remember making
to live, somehow, inside the stardust of the absurd.
I’ve spent too long trying to capture
this preposterousness of arrival
and the mystery of survival,
the weird integrity of deliberate ignorance,
the gut-wrenching fear of insignificance.
It’s like spending our final moments on this beautiful Earth
trying to explain the length of the universe.

The trauma of childbirth is thwarted by hormones.
They say one forgets the horror we can’t face,
which is why we go back to do it all again.
In the room where you were born,
suddenly a yell through all my pitiful moans:
‘are you going to catch your baby?’
And you gushed out into my hands,
which weren’t my hands as I was surely dead,
as I’d died in the birthing pool,
on the birthing stool,
on the bed, in the shower, on the toilet seat
and all the places I’d squatted and paced and screamed
in the days it took to get you outside of me
only to realise you’d never be outside of me.
I had to collide with myself,
thus ending myself,
in order to create
the hydrogen bomb’s worth of energy
it took to force a new element.
They keep their secrets close,
these witches, the midwives,
like not mentioning
that vast pause to come
when you are so sticky and slippery
in my arms that can’t do it can’t possibly
and why are you here what are you before you cry
when I –
the ghost of me,
some remnant, a revenant –
hold you and you are so stubbornly silent,
but have eyes that look like stars
and possibly everything real is primal
in this new starlit era
arriving out of the Age of Darkness;
you are so still,
perhaps you are dead too,
or are still trying to breathe fluid –
living in the past –
your first one step behind
where we all stay for the rest of our lives,
and there is blood and slime and gore and cords
and I’m dead but I have these hands
that now exist only to hold you,
from gas exploding to somehow create solids.
The source of star energy is still a mystery
to everyone;
subatomic energy is beyond gods
and yet,
birth.
Suddenly, you cry.

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Ivy Ireland is the author of the poetry collections Incidental Complications (2007), Porch Light (2015), The Owl Inside (2020) and Tide (2023). Ivy’s literary awards include the Australian Young Poet Fellowship, the Olga Masters Short Story Award, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the Thunderbolt Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize local award, and runner-up in the UC International Poetry Prize. Ivy completed her PhD at the University of Newcastle and her poetry, short fiction, essays and reviews have been widely published in journals and anthologies.

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