Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

ARTS AND CULTURE

Submission to the elements

  • 04 June 2018

 

 Selected poems

 

 

Drum beats 

'feel the beating

of the hearts gathered

in the hollow of the drum.'

— 'Message Sticks': Josephine Bacon

[Innu-aimun]

 

In the quiet darkness

between the rain

scudding through,

they say destructive winds,

how does that look in

the dark, the threshing

and the flailing,

submission to the elements?

 

Winter fronts roll through,

we have had our tongues out

for rain, genuflected

in case it may have helped,

and now another scud

rattling on the tin roof,

gutters run over like a

gushing bereavement.

 

There is foment out there

in 24/7 land, alienation, no

sense of understanding,

a disconnect, not like us

who traipse through newly

wet paddocks, slushing, mudding,

or kick up dust and stones

in summer stillness, we can

feel the pulse, the earth is a

drum across which we walk

respectfully, know how to make

it reverberate, read it with

our bare feet, in our heartbeats.

 

We have been taught the rhythms,

know how to call the next valley,

and out here in Country, can call

up boiling clouds to give succor,

to wet and tighten the skin of the

drum, so we can sing and dance again.

 

 

Space oddity

'Busy old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus'

— Donne: 'The Sunne Rising'

 

Through the wide glass eyes

of the silent space swimming station,

its orbit defined by swooping

loops of loose gravity,

omniscient above the winking earth,

blue earth, swollen image, Christmas

bauble of temptation and beauty,

suns and moons calling the divisions

of day and night, in accelerated

snatches of reality, pictures of sleep,

memories of sleep, sleeplessness,

beams of light so strong, eclipses

and clouds all creating a life

without context and reference

points, where gravity gives,

and takes away any grasp of

firmament, toe hooks on

the base plate to give a sense

of stability, grip of reality, where

standing fast for a few moments,

reminds us what it is to get a hold,

to be erect and standing fast,

gives a sense of humanity.

 

David may have sung his way

through an imaginary, rotating,

hovering world of invisible tension,

Chris Hadfield lived out the dream,

floating guitar in hand, became one

of the stars for orbiting, the haunting

melody rotating with the suns and

moons, that divide time, reality,

and the words of the song echo

in extremis as they begin

their journey

to the end of somewhere,

nowhere,

in the theoretical lenscape

of infinity, with beeps, light rays,

light years, with no reference points

except those you thought you knew

before you let go and trusted the

boosters and the technicians at

ground control, who may by now

be trapped in the cobwebs of history,

be dead in the other time from which

you were released at take-off.

 

 

When the man comes 

'The old cormorant keeper —

I haven't seen him

this year'

— Buson

 

Seasons and events roll out

in a long pattern, like the way

the wet comes across Country,

trickling down waterways, a

presence unannounced,