Selected poems
To a grandchild
(Summer 2007)
Fondly I remember Evie,
aged approximately one,
pumping her short, sturdy legs
along the shore at Watson's Bay,
drumming on the metal hulls
of dinghies beached and overturned —
diminutive, a dynamo
intent upon discovery —
feet synchronised instinctively
to that high summer's azure heartbeat,
eyes alight with equipoise
and avid for the journey ...
*
Now that you're twelve
you lope on long, lithe legs,
bronzed by the northern sun;
you leap across the ballet stage
in grands jetés, you dive and swim;
on sports days, fleet as Atalanta,
yours is the athletics track;
now that you're twelve, I can't keep up
with you, my beautiful gazelle ...
for Evie, on her birthday
Archives of the feet
My feet are like my grandmother's —
slender, delicately formed; the intricately
branching bones of ancestry, her family tree,
well shod in leather lace-up pumps
with elevated heels, enhancing the perception
that has stayed with me: my grandmother
was ladylike and dignified.
I did not share her narrow face and frame,
wasp waist and sloping shoulders,
nor was I endowed with her long torso
or her queenly bearing; only slender,
shapely feet, like those destined to bear her far
from her milieu of Sydney's harbour,
northward to the Queensland border:
jungle foothills of Mount Warning,
wilderness beyond Point Danger.
In Capricorn, her fan of golden straw
would hover like a gnat;
muslin handkerchiefs and smelling-salts
were ever within reach.
I look down, and recall the sculpted
elegance of ankles, feet,
inherited from some remote forebear
whose name is lost to dust;
my father's mother's sea-green eyes
whose lenses could not camouflage
the gnawing ache of lapsed connections,
her Hebraic sorrow.
The bitter-orange trees of Athens*
The bitter mingles with the sweet
in bitter-orange trees that line
old Athens streets, the breath of all
things vernal in their blossoming;
vermilion lanterns in December
overwintering, to lighten days
diminishing towards the closing year:
each globe complete within itself,
a planetary sphere,
orbiting the axis of the tree,
which seems to live on air.
Today I saw a slender tree
so overladen with its fruit,
I wondered how it could withstand
the burden of its own abundance --
rather like a small and wiry mother
with her clustered brood --
more than you imagined one
small body could bring forth and feed.
On the crowded limbs and twigs
there was no space for leaves;
only the rhapsodic orbs
of glowing embryonic suns.
*The Greek for Bitter-orange fruit and tree is 'nerantzi'.
Gifts in winter
After talk of the muses, I slept,
and in my sleep assembled gifts
to entrust a traveller bound for Greece
to deliver to my mother, Demeter:
a posy of dried aromatic sprigs
tipped with tiny sky-blue florets —
rosemary — a scarf I'd knitted
out of terracotta yarn; two homespun
wraps to warm her through the winter,
till we meet in spring.
I sense the