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ARTS AND CULTURE

Prayer at the scarred tree

  • 20 March 2017

 

Selected poems

 

Prayer at the scarred tree

Ever have those moments

When you wish there was someone with you

And there's not?

Nothing but your cold lonely self

Which you re-enter like a reluctant astronaut.

I want to cry out,

Fill me however you will,

Just fill me.

This hunger that gnaws endlessly in my guts

Will be the death of me

But is the life of me,

Because in braving yourself to the emptiness

Something is born

Something happens.

Watch and observe,

Tell the story well,

Make it an expression of your sanity,

Which is otherwise at risk

From waves generated by the outside world

And past regrets.

Again and again, only pen and paper between me

And  an awful emptiness.

And so I must stand and wait for the words to appear,

And, when they do, receive them

Like a grateful fisherman receives the gifts of the sea.

I must believe what I say:

That is the greatest test.

Give me wisdom,

Give me strength.

— Martin Flanagan

 

 

A place I've never been

'Each moment is a place

you've never been.' — Mark Strand

  

So I find myself

always in the throes of arrival

 

and of departure,

dragonfly hovering,

 

always in the known

and the unknown,

 

always waking

and falling asleep,

 

always clothed and naked,

always holding on to

 

and letting go,

comforting myself

 

with the presence of body,

with the illusion of familiarity.

 

Again, the snow is falling

and the magnolia's petals

 

will turn brown and fall.

Our home of three years

 

is emptying, returning to

the shell of itself,

 

effacing us from every

room, our voices, our

 

noise, our clutter,

and we, all five of us,

 

are in the throes of departure

and of arrival,

 

where we are,

where we've never been.

— David Adès

 

 

Hearing the call

I heard the call from a great distance,

puncturing silence, puncturing restraint,

felt it as knowledge, a psychic cry

 

bouncing off the ether with pinpoint accuracy,

reaching me in a hotel in Konya at breakfast,

breaching thought like a whirling dervish,

 

the sonic vibration of a tether between us,

umbilical, a call borne of extremity,

a call heard neither before or since.

 

I heard the call and answered

from a great distance, but didn't heed it,

didn't change direction,

 

and though in all the years left us

we never spoke of it,

you never said a word,

 

my astonishment grew and grew,

that you called out like this,

that you found me, that I heard you.

— David Adès

 

Martin Flanagan is a journalist and author who writes on sport, Australian culture and the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia.

David Adès is the author of Mapping the World and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. His latest book, Afloat in Light, is forthcoming in May 2017 from UWA Publishing. His poems have been widely published.