A selection of poems by Warwick McFadyen
The Centre of Zero
He walked along the faint-lit hall
pondering each slow footfall:
was there meaning in the day,
in these soft steps, in this sway?
He paused then for a moment brief
(the length of a dropping leaf)
to ask if shadow and flame
were both halves of the one frame
that shaped as it played upon the air.
It was the match and flare
came the soul’s reply, the spark
and the glint, the folding dark.
He stopped, and then closed his eyes,
saw zero as sea and skies,
held close time’s flickering chains
felt the heart beat in his veins.
The October Poem
You open the atlas and run your fingers
along the edges of continents,
climb mountains, trace valleys,
pause at coastlines of sand and wave.
This is where you have been and this,
fingers arched, is where you want to go.
Death is too faint to be seen. Though
you know it’s there, the undiscovered country,
but it is not yet borne in ink or a mark in your bones.
It is a gesture in the wings, a whisper
in your ear: I exist, and one day
we will meet. I will enter your house.
Death has passed by of course at one, two
three remove and you have watched it
through the windows or while at the door,
half in light or shade from the garden,
Or you have heard it brushing against
the roof, rustling in the trees.
But it never sat with you at the kitchen table,
offered to make a cup of tea, said you shouldn’t feel
So unfamiliar with it, take heart with this if you can,
“I visit all houses, sit at all tables, will greet
your friends, neighbours, colleagues. It’s no big deal to me.
And then I leave a bit of me with all of you.
“Say what you will, but I’m fair to a fault.
Emily the poet wrote of me and I was flattered:
Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me…”
And then, one day, death stopped at your house.
It didn’t knock, but came in and sat at your table,
rubbed against your heart and then left but for
a part of itself now etched within you.
And as death left, it nodded towards
your atlas, and pointed to the contours and
shades of your world, and in the silence
of its parting, in the howling gales,
In the untouchable void you felt its wake
behind your eyes – the white-capped sea.
and you held onto this: love once lived
has no frontiers. This is your atlas.
It is October. This is the October poem.
True North
The compass is a useful metaphor
in the directions that one takes.
Its needle is true to self when
push and pull of life forsakes
all points on the circumference rim
known by touch of hands and eyes.
Though it spins and trembles its
centre holds to light of sea and skies
that pours in day and night upon the skin
and shapes the words upon the tongue
that speak of paths and shadows cast,
of journeys false and hope still sung.
Says then the needle to the heart,
in each storm that rises to crease the air
I am you and you are me, true north
transcending, this is our whispering prayer.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.