On my mind
Fridays are for finishing off, dashing away,For Friday night drinks.Fridays are for calculations —Who to visit, and how many,In the next two days.
Fridays are for the weeklong day worker,The old nine-to-fivers, the new eight-to-ninersFridays run into the Easybeats;Fridays are a stack of 45 eps —Stored but never replayed.
On Fridays at three, mothers sighAt the weekend Siberian landscape —The forty-eight hours of swing pushing, sport,And sibling mediation.
On Fridays, school kids forget to bring their homeworkIn the haste to leave the institution,And waltz, chatting with their mates,Home to the land of the free.
There are traffic jams on Friday,And women, imagining their wardrobe choices for a date.There are weary smiling workers recovering from a Thursday night event.There are men planning this, the second weekend, with their family.There are married couples —One in the throes of giving up hope of being touched,The other working hard to ensure the weekend is chaste.
Weekend conferences, workshops, classes and lunch.Football, club dinners, twenty-first birthdays.
But those belong to the weekend, not Friday.Friday carries that heavy grey cloud of hope in a drought.Friday is a ticket to the cinema before the lights go down.Friday has the lawnmower silent with the blades unknowably blunt.Friday buys the books and keeps receipts as bookmarks.On Friday the term 'fair weather' sounds flattering,sex hopes to be between-two-people-sex, andsleepiness is permissible at all times — except doing that, and driving.
Friday is the sergeant major, subordinating the previous days of the week.Friday is the gateway to two days of open promise.Friday is the superstar walking through your living room.Friday is a numerical calendrical construct.This day is a suitcase the weekly traveller holds in his or her imagination,with a remnant of childhood singinghow extensively delicious the holiday ahead would be.
–Margaret McCarthy
The crowded train
I am looking downat a blind man's legsand his white stick.
Then I see a wedding ringon an old man's handclose up.
The girl next to meis a voiceand the smell of wet.
She was stuck at RichmondI was caught at Laburnumthe sky spoke in extremis.
The rain was horizontalthe wind blew us togetheronto this very late train.
I am the brim of my hatperhaps, or a glancefrom under it.
–Jennifer Compton
Margaret McCarthy is a poet, writer and teacher based in Seddon, Victoria.
Melbourne poet Jennifer Compton's most recent book of poetry, This City, won the Kathleen Grattan Prize in New Zealand.