Family history
For years you search, persuadedthe blank spaces in the jigsawcan be filled by pieceslying on the table.
You comb dictionaries lookingfor the word, eight letters,second one a D, so 7 down fitsin the mortise cut on 12 across.
You twist the cube to makethe green face green, the blue all blue,but a pesky yellow chipalways turns up in one corner.
At last, you realisethat what you hold is nota jigsaw, cube or crosswordbut a faded photograph –crinolines and waistcoats –the heads of him and her,top right, torn off.
Defeated, you concedethe missing corner long agoslipped down in the dustbehind a chest of drawersin a house abandoned.
–Bob Morrow
Moving day
The trailer hauling our ancestor’s furnitureis tiny, so,lest we forgetand merge violentlyinto some other Australians careering upthis old colony road,a bobbing broomstickreminds us of something behind. We had finally crammed our motherlike flattened linen into a Sydney flat,wadded in by what few remainscould be wrestled up steps,through the tiny door,the old house now a dark shellperched in a Goulburn field. The restfragmented between charity,dumps and heirs:like these rattling red cedar boards,felled by our people after the gold all dug out,when the great treesstill clambered up hinterland,felled and milled and wrought into this table,jolting up the freewaybeneath a scarecrow broom,ever onward to the city,such tiny remains of so many hands.
–David Hastie
Asylum seeker
It was hard to stay calm crossing the tarmac;gripping each boy firmlyto ensure they mounted the gangwaybefore another mortarscorched their lives again.
It was hard to look backfor hot desert sands were stinging her eyes,quickly obscuring aging parentswaving forlornly from the terminal.
And it was hard to cryfor the three year oldabducted and murderednow decaying in a corner of the family vault.
As the plane crawled skywardsit was also hard to believethat the pock-marked landscapewould be her last glimpse of Baghdad.
–John Collard
Bob Morrow lives in Melbourne and fell into writing poetry while in Ireland searching for his forebears' roots. He is currently working on a collection of poems about family and the sense of place.
David Hastie is a school teacher and education academic, has published in the fields of poetry, education and history, and has an undisclosed number of pets and relatives.
John Collard has been writing poetry since he was 15. He has worked as a teacher, principal, educational bureaucrat and senior academic. John does volunteer work with refugees and assylum seekers and this poem