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ARTS AND CULTURE

Train gaze

  • 01 May 2012

Contentment is the Enemy of Invention

 When my husband told me he was leavingand moving to Berlin with the au pairit was then my wall came down and I wroteAuf Wiedersehen a definite contender  for the Liverpool poetry prize.  Last Friday, I lost my job in a downsizingprogramme and came up with Guns and Roses,two hundred lines that will surely get mea first in the Broadway competition.For me, misery is conducive to artistic flow.    At present, the washing machine’son the blink and there’s no money for anotherbut I’m bubbling over, drafting an idea I havefor a series of ten sonnets with a sex and water themethat I’m certain will be the best I’ve ever done.I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’tget another job, win the lotto, or fall in love again.

Paula McKay

 

If I could film her reading on the train

 If I could film her reading on the train, the text would be Chagall's biography: her face a study in expressive reverie, flickering with shadows from the Central European pale, the Hebraic industry of small tradesmen, their synagogues — a reflexive cosmos, fearing predators, surviving threats, despite the looming silhouettes of wolves and bears; then dashed apart — the Warsaw ghetto's heroism, stoicism torched and charred, its immolation rendered unto history ...

Her deep eyes glance up from the page without perceiving me, the hidden camera trained on her by my unbroken gaze: their depths elude this shallow century where we shall never meet. Millennia cohered to shape the consciousness they now reflect unconsciously as star- refracting wells in old Vitebsk, glimpsed by lovers clasped in air's embrace above dim, narrow streets, smiling as they skim beneath the moon, in gravity's release.

And so Chagall rests in her lap, an icon smuggled between stations, till we alight at different stops to go our separate ways ... 

Jena Woodhouse

 

Rings of Jupiter

 Sculptor: Inge King (National Gallery of Victoria)

 Imagine, through aeons, how peoples of the Earthgazed at the night sky’s myriad points of light,used name and story to help comprehendtheir place within the mystery

Imagine, through ages, peoples of the worldwith language, observation, instrumentsexpanding knowledge, shrinking distances,seeking further out to the vast space

Now Inge King bearing her ninety years of lifehas forged a concept into solid form.We pause in widening cosmologyand ask again what lies

beyond

beyond

Lerys Byrnes 

 

Impossible

 I rotate it, piece it back togetherthat cube of darkness

I try to find the claspno catch just knotteddark

my hands are soaked indarklayered ribbonthick-caked

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