Author’s photo by Cathy Ronalds

Stones

The mountains’ distant grey baubles shone
through speckled, smoky, red-eyed sun –
variegated, like lichened marbles, they rose
from the eucalypt-carpeted NSW plains –
the Warrumbungles near Coonabarabran,
not limestone-tumbled, but volcanic tuff-
and-breccia, cooled 180 million years ago
into trachyte dykes, domes and plugs. Our pilot
had only a visual license and so we lost our way
flying home late in bushfire smoke. Radio 2 Quebec!
Tell us your intentions! was the radio-tower’s
panicked message (which he switched off). Isn’t that
the airfield over there? you asked, waving the plane’s
manual, pointing to a row of flickering lights.

** 

Lights

We shared a terrace house with his girlfriend.
She sat mutely in the front passenger seat
of the plane like a doll with an exquisite porcelain
complexion. She, too, was screaming when we
touched down, guided by the twinning lights
stretching along the runway. He was mostly
concerned with not getting caught by Air Traffic
Control (afraid of losing his license which, somehow,
he didn’t). The Warrumbungles monolithically,
leap from memory like the son and daughter
we might never have had . . . The following week
over breakfast croissants in Darlinghurst,
his girlfriend smiling by his side, he asked:
Anyone fancy another trip? This time, where shall we go?

** 

Go

You think of all the places you’ve been,
the harbors and villages you’ll never again
visit. The world a dream of signposts and
tumbleweed, cities constructed from sheer glass,
office blocks built on hallowed ground.
You walk along a pristine dune overlooking
the sea – a dune where no footprints mark
the white sand with absence, retreat, flow,
hesitation, sullen doubt. This, you think, is an
edge for a lemming, the summit of opportunity.
The sea rolls in against periwinkle-prickled rocks,
far below, jagged, cracked by constant pounding.
The pigface, dotted with pink flowers, clings
to nothing, all directions whispering: stronger.

** 

Stronger

If you need more of what you said you’d do
and less of what you’ve neglected to be,
be cheered by what might not yet have come
about, or been drained through the sieve of
unanswered questions. You take to bed as if
it’s the only medicine Florence Nightingale
needed, her phials lined up on a side table
like military orders. From such a palace
you promise yourself the most beautiful
days, the melody of an unshared future.
But Shakespeare spoke of love in sonnets
written to someone absent, as if by recalling
regret and rejoicing, he better faced whatever
might lie ahead: pieces of village, war, violence.

** 

Violence

The fingerprints on window-glass will
not disappear. Children carry them in their bones,
their mute unhappiness, curiosity, understanding
of IVOs, a paper that cannot lower raised fists,
or brighten the shadows lying in wait beyond
safe terrace curtains. Rosie Beatty’s Australian
of the Year accolades were bereft, horror-filled,
sorrowful – her son’s blood spilling from
thwarted vigilance, our own medicated nightmares
resonating through lithe suburban evenings –
Behind closed doors, gold bullion smashes
into shatter, a drunken kick delivered suddenly,
a child sent to walk another slippery plank.
Who to believe in? Statistics, raw and beardless.

** 

Beardless

Your face unadorned, cosmetic free.
A self-portrait drawn from Rilke’s era
of sketched animals, zoo observances,
a cage of lines. Eyes bruised by thoughts
unbecoming to a younger woman,
a giraffe anxiously sniffing a windscreen,
a hippo splashing in a fake jungle river,
its leathery hide scarred by battles with sharp
claws. How hard has it been, really? At first
a zebra, crosses back and forth. But lately,
there’s another kind of prejudice: Rilke’s
trapped panther, pacing in silhouette. How
did you not know that a woman always knows
another woman by her mud-smudged eyes?

 ————————

Jennifer Harrison has written eight books of poetry, most recently Anywhy (Black Pepper 2018). She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry and received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry. Recent work has appeared in Australian Book Review 2022, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal 2023, Rabbit 2022, The Hyacinth Review 2023 (France), Unusual Work 2023 and The Fourth River 2023 (USA).