They abandon Mothers, like they abandon Mother

She who breathes us in as we dig her up cut her

All without her we suffer

Yet still we continue to abandon Mother

She is milk and honey

Our once plated breast that we nestled our unformed skulls into

We were stroked and nurtured by her touch, her whole hearted purity,

ultimate love.

 

But still we slap her …

We pull at her hair …

We scratch her …

… still we abandon Mother

They abandon Mothers like they abandon themselves

They abandon themselves as they pour demons down their throats

I light a candle to their poison, a toxicity they have brewed in their own bodies

They are wilted flowers left hanging in a mouldy cup

They are the cigarette ash that has become a daily breakfast

… that taste that lingers

… that smell that imbeds itself

They abandon themselves like they did their own Mother

And we abandon childbearing Mothers like we do our own Mother Earth

Ah, but…

She is the wise maiden that lays you on her back as you sweat out your pain

She is the weaver, the whisperer of fibrous magic who has woven ten thousand baskets to

cradle your food…

… cradle your essence

… just to carry you

She is the medicine you have walked 800 miles to drink

When you walked through the desert she blanketed you from the sands sink

She unlocks your soul from your mind and your mind from your soul

Without her you’re nothing, because of her, you can be starlight

She is the sand, its entirety a mystery, endless and unique

She comes from the stars, energy so profound of love and peace

She sings to the milky way as it reveals our dreaming

She is one with God and our Creator beings whose presence has never left us

She is red blood, rainbow, a blue river that continues to flow and she is the air in your lungs

that breathes your bone marrow vessel into motion

I have been ravenously trying to sit with Mother

… trying connect with her

… as I hold my child in my arms

In my state of hopelessness I come to realise that she already sits with me

sitting beside me, underneath me and above me she holds me, and in that moment,

I acknowledge her, I make my oath to her, I tell her I have not abandoned her, because she is

my Mother, and she is the reason for my being.

She is the pulse of the land, I feel her heartbeat as I clasp both my hands stating my plea.

This connection is eternal, everlasting, infinite and forever, yet why do we forget her,

the molten core of who we are, she who has never forgotten us. (?)

 

‘Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’

Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’

 

i.

I am hanging onto the edge of a continent.

The full moon takes the sand far from the beach

into the gulf’s indifference.

I stand for a moment in this immodest heat.

The world here will burn before it freezes.

The words I write, and the sun, all resist me.

So they should.

 

ii.

As a child I’d pad around thinking ‘if I were a boy’,

another kind of mind and muscle, a difference

as green as grass but it never worked. TV was

my co-parent, my super hero. The outside air filled

with mowers. Nothing would fit the cracks.

Every bird was a visitor, while I stumbled into bricks

or the hidden kicks of the real world. That’s how I fell.

And how I felt. Each stitch was a prick.

 

iii.

Like Osiris or Frankenstein, I am assembled.

 

iv.

Later, when they poked out my eye and stuck in

another, they forgot to tell me it wouldn’t fit quite right,

or I’d be able to see far, to predict every calamity,

but everyone would laugh.

(OK, have it your way.)

Each night I sit down and watch it watching me.

 

v.

Are poems becoming hotter and darker like the world?

Maybe I’m listening for the wrong broadcast

as a loner within screenlight, a bit ‘404 not found’,

living in idle twilight among pickings of lecherous

sparrows, still subject of thanatos, still

hanging around my old address.

Not all the boxes can be ticked.

 

vi.

The sea is my mother tongue, reaching for me

on the sand, my feet slipping in the undertow.

The tide wants me, my paper sails. Μὴ κίνη χέραδας,

Sappho says. ‘Don’t stir up the beach rubble.’

My fragments float.

Μνάσεσθαί τινά φαμι καὶ ὔστερον ἄμμεων.

 

Who has met their trash and forgiven it?

‘One day someone      will remember us.’

Can you see how this day dims?

Cracked along the cortex of

our ruddy homeland. So shallow and proud,

the ridgeline flaring with the wick of

summer. This year, all of the season’s

heat is crammed into a single week.

 

By now we’ve learned:

The best way to bring a forest back

to life is for us to just

exist elsewhere.

Can you imagine? The howling monkeys

and macaques opening up our house

like a purse, storing my hairbrush and broaches

in the trees like glistening, glad-faced leaves.

 

Picture   us

 

first saviours, then villains, and now

a complicated algorithm.

We learned early. Track along

the flats where the sound is sandy and supple,

avoid the shine of whiskey and campfire.

 

Sometimes, with crates we found by the sea,

we collect up golfballs and pretend —

What freshly laid eggs

What split and briny treasure

nestled in these dunes. Here,

the old driving range is home

to an estuary of light,

lapping soft and blind and poxed.

 

Do you remember?

After the riverbeds cracked, bruising beneath

their own boulders, we realised

Every piece of matter is endless, salvaged

and spliced into grubby recognition.

What a relief to no longer ripen ourselves

within bright white sheets, crystal shined teeth.

Tonight, the damp torchlight hovers,

Sweet William pink, a foghorn

in the viny thicket of our

waiting.

1.

It’s back, settling in like an old friend, so even though I’m angry and scared I somehow want to embrace it. Does that make me a narcissist? A romantic? Hey you- it’s been a long time.

 

2.

Seven years, I’m softer now. I will sink into my bed more deeply. Dash will have to flip the mattress every couple of weeks. I will sink more readily. Illness replies: I have missed the boundaries of your body.

 

3.

More and more my dog hides under our bed, afraid of the weather. It’s either old age or climate change. He takes pills to counter one of them.

 

4.

Today I read the beginning of someone else’s story: The disease has been in remission seven years. I see no point in lying to you, this is all true. A good story is a body with so many elements working together. I look out the window and the wind has stopped. But then it blows again, stronger.

 

5.

The wind has severed limbs from trees, driven me mad for three days. It might be the cause of all of this, sharp noise spinning me out, the barometric pressure, the world devouring itself and the build-up of its Earth-belch, like when a hanger falls to the ground, my son hits a high note, when I flush the toilet, plastic crinkling, a door lock clicking, the sound of my own voice when I speak.

 

6.

My acupuncturist needled me in my bed today, showed me where to press on the bottom of my feet to get rid of fear – fear feeds the illness. I’m frightened if I touch it too much and stop being afraid I’ll lose the desire to write – fear feeds the writing.

 

7.

I am sheltered on a couch in my brick box office, surrounded by poetry and memoir, books about trauma, books about illness, four books on the top shelf about the Rolling Stones, which I’ll begin to read as the band members die off, one by one. Or when my father does.

 

8.

I always think about my parents when it comes back. Illness reminds me I’m a daughter.

 

9.

Cicero says that a room without books is like a body without a soul. It’s quiet out here, away from the house and the people inside it who only want what’s best for me. The wind’s picked up again. There’s a zombie cyclone over Queensland. New South Wales is flooded. I read about a dust storm there too. My illness has come back with a malice I haven’t known for seven years. I need to be alone.

 

10.

Each time I cry today I am supremely alone.

 

11.

Everything I write today is mine alone.

 

12.

In America, my brother and his family are loved-up, snowed-in. People there, used to snow, cannot believe the snow. They take selfies of themselves in it, smiling. Thousands have been left without power. Three people have died.

 

13.

When the attack comes it will be a violent storm. I am preparing for it. I am trying to prepare for it. It’s annoying because I cannot prepare.

My son’s birth makes me grateful for my mother

It transforms time to a before, a now and what is to come

Teaches me what I would do for him

Awakes a worry about what awaits

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

I mouth the words

Of a language taken

My baby continues the connection

He is the land, the earth, the water

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

He mimics my mouth

I see his grandfather in it

Hear the words my grandmother never spoke

There are thousands of years in those eyes

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

‘and he has your complexion’ a midwife laughs

When I tell her the meaning of his name

My skin will never be black enough to answer for living in this city place

But the stories told about this place don’t start from the start

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

I will take him

To touch the soil and place his feet in the water

Greet the land of our ancestors

Bury his placenta in the earth

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

This year of his birth is also

The death of rivers and of land cracking and dry

Of seas swelling and oceans rising

Of people fleeing conflict and drowning at sea or being turned away

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

They cut down birthing trees

To build roads

That will get people places more quickly

As if this is not a place

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

But there are many histories hidden –

Stories are kept in the earth

In the roots of the trees, in the water and in the sky

There are answers to our questions here

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

When the birds have nowhere to come home to

And the reefs are white as bones

When oil and gold and coal and minerals and food and water are gone

Plastic money will make no body rich

 

What kind of future are we making?

 

When he is born I place the possum skin against him

I wonder what in the world

Could be more important

Than what kind of future we leave

When I was a young girl

my teacher used to tell me I was an Island.

He was a stuffy concrete home.

His flower bulb hands would swim across

the ocean of my stomach.

And when he swam

I swear he could see the coral

Inside me – all blue and green

and even golden brown

like the colour of my skin.

Until his words got too hot

and bleached my body

and so I screamed

and he looked at me,

with all the wonder in the world.

As though I was now a sinking Island

but he was an airless tin shed

who housed rotting wood with holes.

I want to decamp from

the changing climate of his hands

to catch the cool wind of the past

all those years ago

when the sea stretched out

as far as my limbs.

But now the sea leaps

at my home only metres away.

an epoch in decline

kings will come and go

disorder and war will take turns in pursuing you

men will die on the battlefield

women will be abducted

small states will spring up

a fragmentary existence

will be theirs

and yours

 

rivers dry up

you will look back at

gleaming terraces once

flourishing with rice

& say

how did this happen?

how did this come about?

 

if ties are a one-way street

& just ties

then ties are slavery

dim-witted and foolish

we trusted you

now the horses are at the border

forest dogs howl

 

now we can only hear coming

a rushing river of mud

 

we are too far from the coast

the ocean is on fire

we cannot see it

we are too far away

 

1

 

‘The northwest, abrupt corner of Norfolk, staring out

across the Wash, at Boston Stump’

                                                                         R.H. Mottram, 1948

 

black & white photo                         sheer cliff

 

upper layer                       white chalk

lower layer                                       dark chalk & sandstone

 

jagged slabs at the base                             one tall and vertical

I confuse with the Stump

 

white face

black profile

 

2

 

Is this my landslip

terra infirma

her terra form [a]

I will not find a shot

of the perfect vertical

no sun      no contrast

 

northwest Norfolk

is more abrupt

 

ab rupture

and each new rupture

leading out of

 

chalk walks              chalk entails and entrails           the horizontal

 

fresh white chalk flow              reverting to         white wing signal

do not lift the cover         albino toad           or it will turn to stone

ossified           brutalized                specialized

 

try colour:

lava flow                                                             red iron     stain chalk

brick work of Brexit            these bricks will all melt    and return

tired of reformations         and refurbishments                    kissing

not allowed          across coasts                           lest it be headlined

the kiss of death

 

no medusa           a soft flow face        distorted                   maimed

monstrous       elephant               woman                        in the room

with one eye              and toothless              not entitled

 

razor shells                         rounded brush strokes

concave enclave                monumental wings

 

spectral wind turbines                          stare back across the Wash

translucent fungi

at home with

only Earth language

in his tongue

 

though his astronaut gravity

would rather talk Mars

 

206 million ks at perihelion!

(mantra, mantra!)

 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

 

updrafts of wishful,

purpose, dearth,

 

light-years speeding past

 

+ — + — + — + — +  — +  — +  —

 

while lifespan dwindles in pursuit

 

⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫  ⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫  ⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫⟫

flight of the im/possible

 

his childhood porthole tree

soaring in remembered

deciduous height

 

⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣ ⥣

 

his permanently fleshed limbs

too much an anchor

 

O Mars, red torment,

beloved orbital

 

free of junked Earth!

 

O

 

O                       O

 

O

 

waking, sleeping, incessantly

 

oh yeah!

i ask jonny to tell me again

about the science behind

climate modelling

 

i ask jonny to keep it simple

not for our readers

but for jonny

because he’s new

to science communication

and no one here is in touch

with their feelings

 

he tells me it’s like when

your mother is sick

and you receive the diagnosis

 

he says the question is not

do you believe in sickness

and it is not

do you believe in diagnosis

 

he says the question is

does my diagnosis

mimic your mother’s symptoms?

 

jonny doesn’t know

my mother died of

lung cancer

 

i don’t blame anyone

i don’t blame the doctors

whose tools

were not exact enough

i’m grateful for the lives they save

 

(though i know how many

women’s lives

are lost at the altar of science)

 

i was cast into a pointless orbit

a world without mothers

a world where modellers

must never be seen

to be healers

and science communicators

must not rely so heavily

on metaphor

 

in the anthropocene

models are reality

and language is approximation

 

we have a living mother

she breathes and breathes

and she will cast us out

Djerrinallum

 

Late afternoon light spills

gentle

across your swaying flank –

crouched and somnolent on basalt plains –

stroking you into lengthening shadows, still heady

with the perfume of summer grasses;

 

The bleached yellow smoothness of your cauled hump

drapes

a membrane over what has gone before –

 

distant explosions,

the earth itself on fire,

the molten surge that tore your lip

[pressure, pressing up]

then pouring down

that wide gold-vermillion road and

out into the cooling night, its

open fields –

 

 

Tonight, dust and grass seeds gust and

settle;

sea swallows rise like prayers and

magpies try their notes into the gathering dusk:

 

 

Out of sight,

earth turns and groans,

cracks and heaves –  and still

we ride her

always too confident

into an opening dark.

i) policy

 

Fingers rap

on cedar desks, tappity tat,

Business spreads,

four corners, ashen beds,

forecast projections of profitable

nothing. Tick

Trifling men rub kindling profits;

Fire imbued value

 

Office seats cushioned kafir green, a favourite

soft-senate touch afore the parade prances forth.

Platforms of healing and property defined –

sit, submit, (repetoir), succum; fuck; candy-sized emnity, suck –

disparate to the slurrp! Tock.

 

Succor facade ergo superfluous placard; incorporated neo-individuality,

Be free; sit, succumb, uargh! cum

The space to contrive tomorrow’s blinding light,

Words and policy, worms are poetry. Change, a paper cup,

on the streets filled with piss – no braves to empty, only the rain brims calamity

 

ii) masculinities

 

Requip as stoic

Toxic earth/man duality

I have listened with cut off ears

Your cries stymied

as such the mind/body problem

Worked out as long division

 

Requip as aggressor

Moxy man brutality

I have and you have not

My lies are bitter pills

as much yellow as you can swallow

Hard work for a berk imprisoned, rambler

 

Requip as tender father

Locks children in misgiven smother

Stops cogitation pushing farther

Heaps pressure unto boys and

Girls unto boys

Unto sons, unto sons

Dying alone one day,

Nucleic pride hap desperation

 

Requip as quiet imaginary

Watches

Sees but does not speak

Dissent in whispered hush

Scarpered shame and an apathetic

Prick on the Weltschmerz belt

 

Requip as cynic

Lies politic

Tock, tick, Tock,

Got to imitate

For means are false

Romantic failure, As expected

Look around outside your woe,

Look around

 

Quip as the first

Suffering at a geo-locale distance

The ebb of wealth come care

Sans project

A hope for more is writ optimism

Sans project

A dream for more is benign, without a brimming cup of piss

Faceless, of one mind, we have come

to know the depth of our own blood—

 

not the luxurious blue of sirens nor

the lightning green of pond lilies, but brackish

 

as the spitting sea that will outlive us—ringing

the ruthless shadows as desire rings the flesh

 

of the earth. The heart is a long ladder, a mirrored

& sleeved thing. Our tongues have relished

 

the sweetness of this year’s magnificence, our faith

lush & razor-edged. Out of the clear calm,

 

a shock of roots—hands of a virtuoso climb

& astonish. Here, in the north, our beauty

 

besieges winter. Men tread the trees’ memory

brazenly as tyrants do, not knowing the woodland

 

is our birthright, where the sun is all mouths

& the river writes her elegy on our limbs

 

tirelessly with her ink of light. Watch us toss

& lurch as a leafy coliseum under the sky’s

 

metallic sheen, each honest self burrowing deep,

staking a claim on what is ours to inherit.

There was a tree you climbed,

height-thrill and warm bark against

 

your skin. You don’t know what kind of tree

it was. Today, waiting for your mother in the city,

 

she’s running late and it’s pouring rain,

(did she slip, is she okay?) a sudden violent

 

outburst—it never used to rain like this in Melbourne

did it? A heavy, humid gush that sucks brollies

 

inside out. See her in the distance, both smaller

and more certain than you remember.

 

You booked an Indigenous walking tour

for her birthday. The guide shows

 

possum pelts and baskets,

photographs and stats: of sheep-heavy

 

ships, within years there were

six million, mouths to the ground,

 

munching food sources, hoofed animals

galloping, an empire built on enthusiasm

 

and brutality. The group clucks concern—if only

they had known better, done better,

 

listened more, blundered less. Outside

in the rain-fresh air by Birrarung (river of mists),

 

the guide pulls a leaf with white spots,

people think it’s bird shit or cobwebs

 

but they’re lerps, from tree lice, sticky sweet

sugar you can eat. Mothers would teach their children

 

where honey was secreted in a flower,

which leaves to chew on and which to leave alone.

 

Remember your primary school

project, how proud you were to talk about

 

orchards planted here by your ancestors, diligent

German immigrants, long-faced and genteel,

 

settlers who formed a community and

called it Waldau—‘a clearing in the forest’.

 

How much is missing from your inherited memory?

Apples and pears were razed in favour of

 

suburban dwelling well before you entered

the family line. Stories passed down your

 

father’s side but your Mum’s a quieter song

(fragments: Dundee dirt floors, a ship,

 

a death at war). That photo in the yard, you as a

squint-eyed toddler, chubby and scowling on your

 

mother’s lap, siblings clustered close, her

face a soft surprise (How did I end up here?)

 

The tree’s not in the picture, a detail

half-remembered, a kind of drifting

 

amnesia easy to dismiss. Your life has not (yet)

depended on the knowledge of a tree.

Wrap closure with a quick reaction

Fellowship. And not build on that steam,

 

But help defend pulp familiars.

While still nursing a diva to his fellow

 

Color and delineating shadow,

‘Let’s cut through that lawn shell—

 

And work from there.’

But the difference was in the numeracy program. (Photo

Souped-up, the latest mix of solid skirt with white,

 

Architectural turbans.)

Streetwear led the charge.

Palm fronds had been pumped up. The jokes, the layers.

 

Everything they were used to,

Already dispatched to the area. ‘Let’s

 

Strip away handcrafted textures. Become laid-back,

Remote as materials in a village of napalm scars.

Become the target,

 

And comfort from there.’

Clay pans shrink to pools

in the trail of a wet season

hold a microcosmos

teeming with life

 

Red finned gobies

flash a miniature flame

though tiny succulents

 

Carnivores varied as coral

wave vivid flowers

trick insects

to their water-garden

 

Under a shrinking puddle

snails with no shell

dig in for the long hot spell

 

*

 

Termite mounds signpost

a desert soak after rain

Green shoots on cumbungi

a magic lure for butterflies

 

Banded finches, zit, flit

in button grass, bring sound

and action to the silent pond

 

Dragon flies, water striders

hover, buzz the fetid air

with new life as the system

gives way to wild extremes

 

Low rainfall, high winds

bare earth eroding

every gully under the sun

 

*

 

Stored a million years ago

water from the inland sea

flows in ancient channels

underground

 

Rises in sacred ‘gnammas’

hidden rock mounds

keeping the desert alive

 

Farmers running cattle

bore into the basin

compete with the micro life

on a land with no water

 

Wild creatures struggle

to hold on, losing the fight

through every failing season